When I recently set out to bring my resume up to date, I was surprised to discover that there are very few LaTeX classes or package designed for writing resumes. I decided to fill this void to the best of my ability, and the result is available here. This class requires the non-standard pgf package to display some graphical elements.

In addition to just downloading the latest version of the class file, you can also access the code repository by installing darcs and executing the following command in a terminal:

darcs get http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/resume-cls

How do I use it?

To use the class, download resume.cls and place it in your TeX path (for instance, in the same directory as the source code for your resume). In your TeX file, where you would normally write \documentclass{article}, instead write \documentclass{resume}. In the preamble (the stuff before \begin{document}), use the following commands to define your contact information:

\author	Your name
\email	Your email address
\streetaddress	Your street address
\citystatezip	Your city, state, and zip code
\phone	Your phone number
\webpage	The URL of your Web page

These work the same way as the standard LaTeX author definition commands: for instance, \author{Daniel Burrows}. With the exception of \author, all of these commands are optional and may be omitted.

Once you've defined your contact information, you can write the rest of your resume. This is done in the same way that you would write any LaTeX document, using the usual commands for sectioning, lists, etc — although I recommend you use the compact lists from the paralist package to save vertical space. One resume-specific formatting command is provided:

\affiliation[details]{institution}{dates}

This command is used to indicate a period of affiliation with an institution or organization. It is specifically meant to be used in either an Education or a Experience section of a resume, but I'm sure there are other uses that I have yet to think of. The institution argument indicates the institution with which you were affiliated, and dates specifies the dates of the affiliation; the optional details argument can be used to provide additional information (for instance: job description, magna cum laude, etc).

Are there any example files?

As a matter of fact, yes! A sample resume is part of the resume distribution; you can also see the source code for my resume.

Are there any other knobs to fiddle with?

For the most part, you can just look at the resume class file itself to see what you can override. As usual, anything without an at-symbol (@) is fair game. For instance, the package uses the commands lrule and rrule to display rules that are (by default) displayed flush left and flush right. You can change these commands to suppress the rules or replace them with any typesetting commands that you choose. If you just want to change the color of the rules, you can modify the color variables rulestartcolor and ruleendcolor -- these control the gradients that are used to draw the rules.