Résumés and cvs are dynamic documents that must be constantly maintained over time. This requires constant editing of these documents to accurately reflect the progress in your career. They should also follow good design principles to both attract the eye to the pertinent information while not distracting the reader from the main points. The layout should be clean with easy to read fonts and good alignment principles.

As far as design matters go, the extent of my knowledge was from a scientific writing class at UNC (yes, I am still bemoaning the loss) and some advice from some of the good folks here at UChicago Grad. For a good introduction to these principles, I would recommend the The Non-Designers's Design Book by Robin Williams (not the late, great actor) which was one of my textbooks for the aforementioned class.

While having a good design is important, what really matters is the relevant content that should always be up to date. The design principles are only there to point the reader to what you want her to see and what she will hopefully be looking for. Therefore, you need a good system to easily modify the content while letting the computer handle all the typesetting nonsense I loathe.

Donald Knuth was on to something with \(\LaTeX\) in insulating the user from all the complexity involved in professional typesetting. However, it does not provide the comical insulation from functionality that can typically be encountered in Word. By combining \(\LaTeX\) with the org-mode export functionality, you can tailor the appearance of your résumé exactly to your liking and then use org's intuitive markdown to manage the content.

In looking into this, I started at looking at the types of formatting templates for \(\LaTeX\) that have already been created for this purpose over at www.latextemplates.com. Then I started to realize that org is still in a transition period to the new ob-latex from the previous documentation for org-mode < 8.0. As such, I found modifying the custom style from punchagan's description of using org-mode for his resume was a good start.

By selecting the desired sections from my cv, I was able quickly create a new org file for my résumé. Unlike a cv, a résumé should be a single page tailored to the task at hand. With the new style, I now have one to share with you.

• résumé
• code

Now that I have a better handle on reigning in the power of \(\LaTeX\) into the org-mode export process, I will see what I can do with the layout of my cv. I hope this help you all with charting the course of your own life.