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

[Joel C. Salomon]

On 07/27/2010 07:43 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> I don't think that you really need a list environment at all:
<snip>
> \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}
<snip>
> Does this produce what you expect?

Quite nicely; in fact I'd arrived at a similar solution myself.

Only more complicated, because I separated out the formatting code:
	\newenvironment{reslist}
		{\bgroup\def\item{\par}}
		{\egroup}
	\newcommand*{\ressection}[1]{\medskip#1&}
	...
	\ressection{Skills}
	\begin{reslist}
		\item	Exposure to advanced ....
		\item	Experience with real-time, embedded, and ....
	\end{reslist}

Then I went a little nuts.  In the Experience section, I wanted to
include multiple points of interest for some jobs, and have the job
title inline with the first item, so...
	\newenvironment{resexp}[3]
		{\bgroup\def\item{\relax\def\item{\par}}
		\par\textbf{#1}\hfill\textbf{#2}
		\par\textit{#3}: }
		{\smallskip\egroup}
	...
	\begin{resexp}
		{NASA Glenn Research Center/Ohio Aerospace Institute}
		{Summer 2007}
		{Summer Intern}
		\item	Performed a fault-tree analysis on an Ares I
			power-distribution system.
		\item	Helped rewrite the in-house rule-book for
			performing future fault-tree analyses.
	\end{resexp}
This gives me something like:
	*NASA Glenn Research Center*		*Summer 2007*
	/Summer Intern/:  Performed a fault-tree analysis on
	an Ares I power-distribution system.
	Helped rewrite the in-house rule-book for performing
	future fault-tree analyses.
I think that the \def\item{\relax\def\item{\par}} is a little
disgusting, but it seems to work.

> 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}).

I'm actually porting the format I'd developed with OpenOffice.org to
LaTeX, and I'm using the same font (Jos Buivenga's Fontin).

> 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):
<snip>

That's a useful tip; thanks!  Right now, though, my job applications are
pretty much just a cover letter in email with the résumé as an
attachment.  I'll keep your tip in mind for later.

Actually, I think there's a PracTeX article in the making:  Maintaining
a set of job applications with LaTeX and Git.  Maybe sometime soon.

Thanks for the help,
--Joel Salomon