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CV formatting with C

u

rV

e

Didier Verna

Abstract

C

u

rV

e

is a L

A

very special feature known as the flavor mechanism: it

is able to manage different “flavors” (versions) of your

CV simultaneously.

C

u

rV

e

is distributed under the terms of the LPPL

license. This paper gives an overview of the features

available in version 1.4.

− − ∗ − −

Let’s start with an example or C

u

Figure 1: C

e

1 Yet another CV class ?

The first draft of C

e

completing my Ph.D. and was starting to look for

a job. At that time, several options were available:

E

none of these options turned out to be satisfactory

for me.

As the visual aspect of a CV is som ething very

important, one could be tempted to use a WYSI-

WYG editor, thinking that the layout conception

would be faster. For me, this was (and still is)

wrong:

• Firstly, WYSIWYG editors are usually far from

it: what you see (on screen) is most of the time

a WYSIWYG editor would involve a deep knowl-

edge of the editor itself (for instance, knowing

how to use styles instead of manually format-

ting all paragraphs the same way). Hence, us-

ing a WYSIWYG editor properly turns out to be

very close to using L

A

T

E

knew L

The next solution was to use an already exist-

ing class or s tyle with L

A

T

E

X. For reasons that I

won’t mention here, but that can be found in its

documentation’s introduction, the only reasonable

option was currvita (Reichert, 1999). This solution

did not satisfy me, mainly because the layout was

too limited for me. Layout is probably something

very personal in this context, but I also believe that

mistaken.

So I decided to use L

A

T

E

other reasons for this are explained later). Being

a lazy kind of person however, I tried not to rein-

vent the wheel, and I found that David Carlisle’s

LTXtable package would do most of the formatting

for me. Being also a free software kind of person,

I wanted other people to benefit from my work, so

I naturally made it a proper class with a complete

documentation.

The first release of C

rV

The primary purpose of C

rV

defined commands to specify the contents of your

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CV, while removing from you the burden of format-

ting it. This has two important consequences, how-

e

ment structuring scheme, and will expect that you

like the way it formats the output.

Figure 1 shows the output of C

u

on a very

small sample CV. There is no user-level customiza-

tion in this example.

2.1 Headers

As you can seen on the example, a C

u

e

CV be-

gins with two optional headers (upper left and upper

right) in which you usually put your name, address,

tween them. After these headers come an optional

on the page.

The headers and titles in this example are spec-

ified in the document’s preamble as follows:

This scheme is very traditional in L

X classes

gument to \makeheaders specifies the vertical align-

ment. Here, top is used. Many more commands are

available to customize the appearance of the headers

(positioning, size, fonts, etc.).

2.1.1 Rubrics

tail in your CV. Typical rubrics, as demonstrated in

the example, are “Education”, “Professional Expe-

rience” and the like. Rubrics have a title (which will

be centered) and appear under the form of properly

aligned “entries” (see below). If a rubric has to be

split across different pages, its title will be repeated

automatically.

Here is the code used to generate the “Profes-

sional Education” rubric:

as a mandatory argument. The other commands will

2.1.2 Subrubrics

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The key is “XEmacs” and the entry’s contents

is “Member of the review board.”. Keys are usually

u

e

contents together. Keys are optional (hence, they

should be input within brackets) in order for you to

classify several entries together (without repeating

the same key over and over again). For instance:

year as the OpenGL one.

tually, \entry* commands in rubric environments

are very similar to \item commands in list en-

new scheme is much more elegant, but backward

compatibility has been preserved.

This is a very nice feature of C

rV

, and is also one of

the reasons that made me w rite it in the first place.

It is often desirable to maintain several slightly

divergent versions of one’s CV at the same time. For

the “Professional Experience” rubric were a bit dif-

ferent; all other parts basically remained the same.

C

rV

provides an easy-to-use mechanism for main-

taining different “flavors” of your CV at the same

time. You basically write different versions of (some

of) your rubrics in different files (this is needed for

technical reasons anyway, as mentioned previously),

tell C

rV

rV

can

even ask you w hich one to use directly). C

u

rV

e

will

then use the global skeleton, and whenever it finds

a rubric file specialized for that particular flavor, it

manage to compile different flavors at the same time.

Supp ose you have a mainstream CV (let’s call it

cv.tex), with an “education” rubric in a file named

education.tex and a “skills” one in skills.tex.

Supp ose further that you want a slightly divergent

version of your CV with an alternate skills rubric.

The normal way to compile the alternate ver-

sion is to save a new rubric file called, for instance,

skills.alt.tex, and tell C

to use it by calling

\flavor{alt} in your do c ument’s preamble. The

only problem is that this alternate version will also

compile to cv.dvi because both versions share the

u

e

ask you at run-time which flavor to compile (this

is done with the ask class option) and use special

Makefile rules to answer the question for you, build

class option to indicate the current flavor to build.

An implementation sidenote. In order to im-

plement the flavor mechanism, the L

T

E

\input has been redefined to look for flavored files

first. This is actually very nice because you can

the flavor alt. Put your alternate subtitle in a file

called subtitle.alt.tex; do something similar for

the default subtitle. Now go to the skeleton of your

CV, and write \input{subtitle} in the preamble.

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That’s it. You’ll have different subtitles in your dif-

ferent CV flavors.

In this paper, I preferred to concentrate on special

aspects of C

on its user interface because it is relatively straight-

forward and fully described in the package documen-

e

tures that are worth mentioning, like support for all

standard class options, support for the .ltx file ex-

tension if, like me, you prefer it over .tex for L

A

X

French, Spanish, German, Italian and Danish).

get my own CV at http://www.lrde.epita.fr/

~didier/perso/cv.php. You will also find a page

describing some formatting tricks I’ve used to make

I hope it will continue to evolve and reach more and