Writing CV, need some advice on achieving structure similar to this

Question

I'm a LaTeX beginner and under a heading (e.g. Interests) I want to have the text laid out as above. Specifically, my problem is getting the part on the right to stay aligned to the line above when it goes onto the next line.

Answer 1

This looks like a case for a table using tabular. (Note that that is different from the table environment!)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array,booktabs} % array is for formatting an entire column as bold
                            % booktabs is good for every table, see its documentation

\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{tabular}{>{\bfseries}lp{7cm}}
        % >{...} specifies commands to be executed for the entire column
        % p{...} is a left-aligned column that breaks lines (p = paragraph)
Tennis & Enjoy playing doubles in tournaments at my local club \\
Cricket & Member of school and College teams \\
Travel & Enjoy independent travel and have visited Germany, Canada, east USA; plus
         several visits to India and Kenya \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε to beginners; 2.11.6 is on tabular, 2.12 is on table. The unofficial LaTeX reference manual also has a useful overview of table (9.22) and tabular (9.23).

---

As Gonzalo suggested, this is a version slightly tweaked in terms of spacing: @{...} changes whatever is in between the columns -- in this case nothing anymore (instead of the space \tabcolsep); \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.2} inserts 1.2 times the normal space between the table rows, which makes the rows slightly easier on the eye.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array,booktabs}

\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.2}

\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{tabular}{@{}>{\bfseries}lp{7cm}@{}}
Tennis & Enjoy playing doubles in tournaments at my local club \\
Cricket & Member of school and College teams \\
Travel & Enjoy independent travel and have visited Germany, Canada, east USA; plus several visits to India and Kenya \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 2

If you like that particular structure for your CV, you should have a look into the moderncv package:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/

Notice the example subdirectory. The alignment problem you described is handled by the package's design. So if you like the overall design (multiple are possible), you should probably use the moderncv package.

Answer 3

There is a huge package from EuroCV that makes for a very nice formatting tool on CTAN. It is a nice set of macros in all languages.

Answer 4

I have found the resume package to be very useful. In the very small example below you can see that the section command is used to create the kind of titles you have as bold "headings" in your own example. The usepackage sequence is just to get the sans serif font droidsans. The regular text will appear to the left of the heading and is not restricted to a single line. Hopefully this could help to some extent. There is of course a lot more to the package than is shown below

\documentclass[margin,line,a4paper]{resume}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} %utf8
\usepackage[english,swedish]{babel}
\usepackage[defaultsans]{droidsans}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}
{\sc\sffamily\Large \textbf{Curriculum Vitae -- Your name}}

\begin{resume}

\section{\mysidestyle Education/\\ Promotions}\vspace{1mm}
\emph{Professor}  1 Jul., 2004

\end{document}