Create Résumé/CV Using LaTex

tutorial

latex

2020

Author

Aster Hu

Published

June 20, 2020

Outcome

My final resume looks like this: Imgur
## Why LaTex Resume?

Modularity

One of the main reasons I switch to LaTex from Word. It’s modular so I can easily customize the module to tailor the position.

Complex formatting

It is just beautiful. A glimpse on any LaTex resume and you would know what I mean.

Easier to maintain

I can focus more on the content itself and no need to worry about format.

There’re cons, of course. The learning curve is quite high, especially at the beginning as you need to setup everything correctly. However, once the setup is done, any changes take very minimal time compared to Microsoft Word.

Install LaTex on Mac

I installed MacTex via cask. I know it’s large (4GB) compared to BasicTex, but I’ve been testing it and turns out there’s always some issue with BasicTex (e.g. cannot locate dependencies). Here is a detailed comparison.

Install cask by Homebrew if you haven’t.

brew install cask

Install MacTex.

brew cask install mactex

Template

There’re lots of resume template on Overleaf. The template I’m using is based on AltaCV. Open as Template and then download the Source. You can edit and compile directly on Overleaf as well, but I prefer a local copy.

The template is good but not exactly what I’m looking for, so I will do some customization.

Customization

Section

There’re many sections that I don’t need, e.g. A Day of My life, referees. Simply searched the keyword and deleted \cvsection{keyword} and other related contents from main.tex.

Colour

The colour is in HTML colour code and can be changed in main.tex. Here is the colour I use.

\definecolor{Teal}{HTML}{009688}
\definecolor{Darkteal}{HTML}{408F96}
\definecolor{SlateGrey}{HTML}{2E2E2E}
\definecolor{LightGrey}{HTML}{666666}
\colorlet{heading}{Teal}
\colorlet{accent}{Darkteal}
\colorlet{emphasis}{SlateGrey}
\colorlet{body}{LightGrey}

Symbols

I found the symbols for email and address is a bit weird, so I changed them in altacv.cls.

% Before
\NewInfoField{email}{\faAt}[mailto:]
\NewInfoField{mailaddress}{\faEnvelope}
% ----------------------------------------
% After
\NewInfoField{email}{\faEnvelope}[mailto:]
\NewInfoField{mailaddress}{\faHome}

More LaTex web icons can be found in here.

Then you will have the final template shows in the beginning. Isn’t it beautiful?