General ⇒ LaTeX Philosophy Question

[InquisitorMo]

This is completely a non-TeXnical question for opinion making. As a former physics student, I was exposed to LaTeX a long time ago; problem sets at the college level, for example, are always in LaTeX - it has that distinctive format and (usually) font (what font is that - modern?) that instantly tells you it's LaTeX.

My question is, now that I'm learning LaTeX for my CV - is that actually a good use case for LaTeX philosophically? Because CVs are completely non-standardized, and everyone essentially makes up their own formatting - would some consider that an abuse of LaTeX, since indeed, unlike say, just using an article class, I am forcing LaTeX to do a lot of hard-formatting, rather than letting it do it the formatting, which I feel is sort of defeating the point of using it?

That said, I've used Word to do my CV historically, and using those tables, etc was just a disaster; altering it become impossible - that's what brought me to LaTeX to begin with.

To make my question more clear - for me, LaTeX has always ideologically meant universal formatting styles - do CVs, which inherently lack such formatting universality and require a user to design a formatting schema, still philosophically align with LaTeX's goals?

[Spider]

Hi InquisitorMo.
Unfortunately your question isn't technical, I can't answer a philosophical question

[cgnieder]

[...] LaTeX - it has that distinctive format and (usually) font (what font is that - modern?) that instantly tells you it's LaTeX.

Usually it's Computer Modern or one of its close relatives like EC, cm-super or Latin Modern.

My question is, now that I'm learning LaTeX for my CV - is that actually a good use case for LaTeX philosophically? Because CVs are completely non-standardized, and everyone essentially makes up their own formatting - would some consider that an abuse of LaTeX, since indeed, unlike say, just using an article class, I am forcing LaTeX to do a lot of hard-formatting, rather than letting it do it the formatting, which I feel is sort of defeating the point of using it?

There are plenty of solutions for creating a CV with LaTeX. If you search CTAN for curriculum vitae you'll find packages like currvita, moderncv or europecv (just to name a few).

Regards

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Even if you don't use LaTeX's strengths regarding large documents with hundreds of pages or scientific typesetting, there are still enough benefits, for example:

• You can start with a designed template
• You benefit from great microtypography (microtype)
• You can use macros such as for tabular CV elements and so tweak all at once
• You can keep the style consistent with your application letter (scrlttr2?) and working examples (papers)
• You can use BibTeX for your list of publications
• You can merge CV, application letter, and certificates into one PDF document (pdfpages) with consistent headers and possibly page numbers and bookmarks
• You can use hyperref in your CV for linking within the CV or to your attachments
• You can reuse the CV years later and just modify style macros and add some new items
• Need your CV in 10 or 20 years again for a new job? No problem with LaTeX. Try to open a 10 or 20 year old word format...

I made my CV with LaTeX and I got the job each time when I applied.

Stefan

[InquisitorMo]

Thank you all for your thoughts!

Stefan definitely made the list I was looking for though. I'm already definitely using Latex for my CV,I just wanted to make sure I wasn't n;t abusing/misusing Latex for purposes it wasn't really meant for.

Basically people asked why I wanted my CV in Latex, because to them, Latex is for journal articles, dissertations, math type setting, etc., and my main answer was just "tables" (because Tables in Word are horrible in every way to work with) - now I have a lot more explanations!

Thanks!