Discovering LaTeX
So back when I was still in college I went hunting around the internet for a OpenOffice.org resume template. I eventually found one that I liked and started using it for my resume. Fast forward 4 years and I was still using this same template. Now I liked the look of this template but I always hated editing it. It was full of tables and different formatting, the template was originally for OpenOffice 1 and 3 is the current version. Needless to say I never really updated it unless I had to and even then only like a word here and there.
That’s when I discovered LaTeX. Well not really discovered, I’ve known about LaTeX for awhile, just have never looked at doing anything with it. But one day I was surfing the internet and came across a LaTeX resume class file. I loved the look of it and figured if I could get it to work it would be so much nicer than the OpenOffice file.
Lets take a step back for a sec so I can explain what LaTeX is for those who don’t know. LaTeX is an extension of the TeX document markup and typesetting program. Basically you write up a document in plain text with some extra LaTeX markup that describes the documents look. This allows you to focus more on the content of your document while LaTeX handles the typesetting. You can then generate the final look using that plain text. Usually creating a PDF. LaTeX is used most by mathematicians and scientists for writing formulas and by book writers. Here’s an example taken from wikipedia.
Here’s the LaTeX markup:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\title{\LaTeX}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the \TeX{}
typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing
features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and
cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies,
and much more. \LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie
Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few
people write in plain \TeX{} anymore. The current version is
\LaTeXe.
% This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
% The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
\begin{align}
E &= mc^2 \\
m &= \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
\end{align}
\end{document}
This generates to look like this:
Pretty sweet. That’s something I can get on board with, writing the document in plain text and then generating the final look. So much easier than fighting a word processor to attempt to get what I want. So I downloaded the class file and set out trying to figure out the LaTeX markup. Now as you can see from the example above the markup can be a little confusing at first. Starting out I mostly just copied the markup from the example from the class file, using the LaTeX book on wikibooks to look thing up as I came to them. After this I found The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX, a relatively short (about 125 page) free ebook. Highly recommended.
So now I have my resume as a plain text file, that is under version control using git. This makes it much easier to go in and make changes whenever I want without having to worry. If I change something that I later don’t like I can just look at the history. Then after I’m done making my changes all I have to do is a “pdflatex resume.tex” to generate a pdf copy to look at. Also because LaTeX is a typesetting system the final output looks amazing.
So there you have it, my conversion to LaTex. Unfortionately the only thing I’ve used it for so far is my resume. It’s too bad I wasn’t enlightened when I was still in college, I would have written every paper in it. So now I keep thinking about what I could use it for. I recently discovered Beamer, a LaTeX class for creating presentations. Tho I don’t usually create slides for my presentations. Maybe I should write a book….
