Making a Resume in LaTeX

[myself.x]

Why LaTeX
The first time I ever did a resume was in 8th grade. That was my first experience with the horror of mixing content and presentation--a lesson I've never forgotten. The problem was that if I wanted to change the font or spacing of something, I had to change it in 50 different spots on the page to make it match. It was awful.

Microsoft Word has styles which can take care of some of this, but it's still not my preferred solution. Even with styles, it's hard to tell exactly what text or spacing is in which style, it's inconvenient to switch back and forth between different styles, and it's easy to have stray format settings in a document without noticing them. If you're going to do a resume in Word, make sure you use styles, but I personally prefer using LaTeX to separate content and presentation, since you can see exactly what's there. For example, to make text bold-faced in LaTeX, you do "\textbf{insert here the bold text}". In WYSIWYG editors ("what you see is what you get"), it can still be hard on a monitor, especially at a lower screen resolution, to tell whether text is bold or just a larger font size than the surrounding text. In LaTeX, there's no ambiguity. Of course, even in LaTeX, it would be better to decide why the text is bold and create an appropriately-named macro because later you might want to put it in italics instead.
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