I’ve decided to revamp my resume. The code of the previous one starting to be an awful mess. Because LaTeX classes/styles were always magic to me I’ve decided to implement my own to use as a base for my resume.
This post will cover some basic latex macros and how to write your own class.
I’ve found that latex by default is very quiet and sometimes when an error occurs it doesn’t show enough to know what is actually wrong
The errorcontextlines lines macro is useful to diagnose what’s really going on
when latex burps up an error.
Apart from that sometimes it’s useful to trace macros (or other things), I don’t have this turned on by default when I compile a document but sometimes it’s needed. For more on tracing see: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/60491/latex-tracing-commands-list
Setting the draft option on in the article class will visually show overfull
boxes and it helps tweaking so much!
Is actually pretty easy. Here are some links that may, or may not be useful for someone trying to create your own class:
This part of the article will be mostly a rehash of those, with a little explanation and notes of my own.
Before we start diving deep into latex I’ve created an minimal file that uses the style:
\errorcontextlines 10000
\documentclass[a4paper,20pt]{cv}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
Foo
\end{document}There are of course some magical incantations but a minimal style file is surprisingly short:
\ProvidesClass{cv}[2013/07/14]
\DeclareOption*{\PassOptionsToClass{\CurrentOption}{article}}
\ProcessOptions \relax
\LoadClass{article}The \ProvidesClass{...} macro declares the actual class named in my case cv.
It needs to be in a file called CLASS_NAME.cls - in my case cv.cls. The
optional argument in the square brackets denotes the version (so that the
package users can specify a minimal class version).
The next macro \DeclareOption*... passes the options given to this class to
the article class that we use as a base.
\ProcessOptions \relax finishes processing options so that we can load the
class. As this post says the
\relax option does nothing (kind of like an nop) but safely stops the
expansion of the ProcessOptions macro.
Finally the \LoadClass macro loads the article class.
Having that out of the way let’s actually do something useful. The rest of the document will be more about wiring macros and using latex with it’s little idiosyncrasies.
The first thing I wanted to add is a simple way of defining a resume header, setting up pdf properties and so on. On the use site it should look as follows:
\fullname{Bartosz Witkowski}
% ...
\begin{document}
\mkheader
% ...And in effect it prints out “Curriculum Vitae” and my full name, and sets up the pdf properties.
When writing macros I usually write “output first”, so first I would write:
{\centering{\Large{\textsc{Curriculum Vitae}}} \\}
{\centering{\LARGE{\textsc{Bartosz Witkowski}}} \\}
\hypersetup{
pdftitle={Bartosz Witkowski - Curriculum Vitae},
pdfauthor={Bartosz Witkowski}
}The \hypersetup macro requires the hyperref package and I’ll add it straight
to the class file ( \RequirePackage{hyperref})
On the second stage I would set up the “variable”.
\def \@fullname {none}
\newcommand {\fullname}[1]{\def \@fullname{#1}}The second line may be thought of as a setter. The @ symbol in latex is kind
of special and cannot be used in user code without some tricks (surrounding it’s
usage int in makeatletter and makeatother). But in classes we can use it as
we like.
After having that defined I modify my output to form a macro:
\newcommand{\mkheader}{
{\centering{\Large{\textsc{Curriculum Vitae}}} \\}
{\centering{\LARGE{\textsc{\@fullname}}} \\}
\hypersetup{
pdftitle={\@fullname - Curriculum Vitae},
pdfauthor={\@fullname}
}
}Another thing I wanted to get out of the way from my cv was margins so I’ve added this to the class file:
\RequirePackage[
top = 3cm,
bottom= 2.5cm,
left=3cm,
right=2cm]{geometry}The biggest problem with my previous cv file was that I’ve lost the WYSIWYM
property. The file was a big clunk of tables, \pars \vskips etc. The new
file shouldn’t care about all that jazz - just meaning.
To highlight what I mean I’ve modified the sample file and added two sections.
\section{Personal Information}
\begin{description}
\item[Date of Birth] { 1970-01-01 }
\item[Address] { ul. Wiejska 4/6, 00--902 Warsaw, Poland }
\item[Phone number] { (+48)012 345 678 }
\item[E-mail] { john-smith@example.org }
\end{description}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\section{Work Experience}
\begin{description}
\item[01.2012 -- present]{
\begin{itemize}
\item {
Intercal programmer at Acme, Warsaw.
}
\item {
Responsible for foo, bar, baz and qux.
}
\item {
{\bf Keywoards:} Intercall, Make, etc
}
\end{itemize}
}
\item[01.2011 -- 12.2011]{
\begin{itemize}
\item {
Lolcode Programmer -- Lolcats Ltd, Gotham.
}
\item {
I CAN HAZ CHEESBURGER
}
\item {
How did I get here I'm not good with computer
}
\item {
{\bf Keywoards:} Lolcode.
}
\end{itemize}
}
\end{description}And this is about 90% of my use case from the resume. So what I needed to do is
to modify itemize and description environments to do exactly what I want.
I’ve opted to redefine them completely like so:
\renewenvironment{itemize}
{
\let \@@olditem \item
\renewcommand{\item}[2][]{
{##1} {##2} \\ \noalign{\vskip 1mm}
}
\noindent
\begin{tabular}[t]{@{}p{0.95 \linewidth}@{}}
} {
\end{tabular}
\renewcommand{\item}[2][]{
\@@olditem[##1]{##2}
}
}
\renewenvironment{description}
{
\let \@olditem \item
\renewcommand{\item}[2][]{
\begin{hyphenrules}{nohyphenation}
\textsc{##1}
\end{hyphenrules}
& ##2 \\
}
\begin{tabular}{@{}p{0.25 \linewidth} p{0.65\linewidth}@{}}
} {
\end{tabular}
\ \renewcommand{\item}[2][]{
\@olditem[##1]{##2}
}
}The let @olditem item and renewcommand item @olditem commands let us
redefine the item macro only in a localized context so that if we wish to use it
in another place we could.
You may notice that the parameters for item macros come with two hashes like:
##1. When we define nested macros we need to add another hash for every level.
This really tripped me at the beginning, as I did not know this.
I’ll start from the description environment - I’ve decided to reuse the tabular
environment. The \item macro will insert a description in the first row
written in small capitals (\textsc) along with the item content in the second
row. The nohyphenation comes from observation - hyphenating words in such a
small row looks really wrong to my eyes. The paragraph widths in the table were
adjusted experimentally until “it looked right”.
The itemize environment was redefined to insert a small skip between every
item. Apart from that it’s really vanilla. We had to redefine it because
normally itemize and tabular environments don’t really mix so well.
Lastly, I’ve defined a little footer macro. In Poland, at least, resumes to be used in a recruitment process have to have a little legal disclaimer.
\newcommand{\footer}[1]{
\null \vfill
\begin{center}
\textsf {
\textcolor[rgb]{0.3,0.3,0.3}{
\scriptsize #1
}
}
\end{center}
}This will flush the page and insert the centered footer on the bottom.
That’s it! I’ve published my resume class on github, along with a small sample. You can grab it here. Or you can backtrack to the main page and see my resume for yourself.