What are the benefits of writing resumes in TeX/LaTeX?

  • I think a resume is more typesetting than word processing, so I would not use MS Word or OOo Writer. One could use Indesign or a free layout program.

  • Often resumes contain text in columns. Text in narrow columns is hard to wrap--TeX does a good job here. For even better justification use microtype with pdfLaTeX. I think with microtype the chance to avoid big gaps or lots of hyphenation is better than with word processors.

  • It's good if the resume matches the covering letter. Since LaTeX is great for letters, for example with the scrlttr2 class, it would naturally be a good choice for the resume.

  • There are specialized LaTeX classes. Though I prefer a class matching the class for the covering letter, such as scrartcl together with scrlttr2. tabularx does already good work then.

  • A resume can be used for many years in your working life, it will grow with the time. LaTeX is stable and remains mostly compatible, so you can reuse your resume when you apply for the next job in 10 years. Imagine, you would have used Works or Starwriter many years ago... you would require old software and an old operating system to reuse an old word processing document. With LaTeX it would be much easier.

  • ConTeXt, which is based on TeX, gives you even more control over typesetting.

On TeX tips, written by John D. Cook, I found a link where Dan McGee shares his experiences:

  • Why I do my résumé in LaTeX

  • LaTeX résumé Follow-up including a template and an example pdf

While looking what others say to this question, I found Matthew M. Boedicker's Tips together with links to resume templates and examples on

  • LaTeX Resume Examples by Derek Hildreth.

If you are a scientist, you will probably need to add a list of publications, conference talks, and similar things to your cv. This is very nicely, and easily handled in LaTeX. With MSWord or OOWriter it gets really messy, expecilay if you have to keep updated your cv in different languages.

LaTeX is also a nice format to store in a revision control system to track different revision of the cv you hand out to different people in different contexts, and its evolution in time.

Have a look at this nice article http://robjhyndman.com/researchtips/cv/.


Besides all the answers here, I have recently modularized my resume with TeX. With this I can quickly build my resume for a variety of different jobs. The basic idea is:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\input{qualifications-Software-QA-Manager}
%\input{qualifications-Tech-Writer}

\end{document}

So I can just uncomment the appropriate sections, and build a completely different resume. My sections are more defined than this, but I've found it to be a major plus when applying for many jobs.

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