[texhax] Formatting my resume: Eliminating vertical space before lists

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 27 July 2010 Joel C. Salomon wrote:

 > Background:  I'm re-doing my résumé in LaTeX, and since I'm not happy
 > with any of the currently-available classes, I'm making my own.
 > 
 > An edited snippet of the file will suffice to show what I am trying to do:
 > 
 > 	\documentclass{article}
 > 	\usepackage{tabularx}
 > 	
 > 	\begin{document}
 > 	\begin{tabularx}{468bp}{r@{\hspace{8bp}} p{396bp}}
 > 	Objective & A career-track position in Electrical Engineering \\
 > 	Skills & \begin{list}{}{
 > 		\setlength{\topsep}{0pt}
 > 		\setlength{\partopsep}{\topsep}
 > 		\setlength{\leftmargin}{0pt}
 > 		\setlength{\rightmargin}{\leftmargin}}
 > 	\item Exposure to advanced Control Systems techniques
 > 		including Kalman filtering.
 > 	\item Experience with real-time, embedded, and
 > 		device-driver programming techniques.
 > 	\end{list} \\
 > 	References & Available upon request.
 > 	\end{tabularx}
 > 	\end{document}
 > 
 > I'd like to completely eliminate the extra vertical space before & after
 > the list environment, so that the sentence "Exposure to ..." lines up
 > with the word "Skills" just as "A career-track position..." lines up
 > with "Objective".  Is this possible with the list environment, or with
 > any of its relatives & clones?

I don't think that you really need a list environment at all:
------------------------------------------------------------------
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabularx}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabularx}{468bp}{r@{\hspace{8bp}} p{396bp}}
Objective & A career-track position in Electrical Engineering \\
Skills & Exposure to advanced Control Systems techniques
 	 including Kalman filtering.

	 \vspace*{1ex}
         Experience with real-time, embedded, and
 	 device-driver programming techniques.\\
References & Available upon request.
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}
------------------------------------------------------------------

Does this produce what you expect?

BTW, nowadays most companies want online applications in PDF.  There
are two things to consider:

1. The fonts provided by TeX Live are fine for printing but often
   hinting is too bad for using them on screen.  One font which
   looks good on screen is Bitstream Charter (\usepackage{charter}).  

2. Everybody likes bookmarks.  A job application consists of many
   parts, most of them are scanned images (testimonials).  In order to
   provide bookmarks, I add this to the very first thing (either the
   cover letter or the title page):

   \usepackage{hyperref}
   \usepackage{pdfpages}
   \newcommand{\includefile}[2]{\pdfoutline goto page \count0 {/Fit} {#2}%
      \includepdf[pages={-}]{#1}}
 
   Then, in the very first part of the application (either the cover
   letter or the title page) I insert something like this at the
   bottom:

   \newpage
   \pdfoutline goto page 1 {/Fit} {Bewerbung}
   \includefile{vita.pdf}{Lebenslauf}
   \includefile{comp.pdf}{Kompetenzprofil}
   \includefile{foo.pdf}{Zeugnis ....}
   [...]

   The first line refers to the current document.  Its last argument
   is arbitrary text which appears in the bookmark panel.  The first
   argument of \includefile is the name of the file to include, the
   second one is arbitrary text which appears in the bookmarks panel.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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