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Given that neither

explicitly touches on this topic, I'd like to close a gap in my understanding:

  • How big should margins be on a typographically (and visually) pleasing CV ?

I think the beauty of *TeX is that it takes care of the good looks, that is, knows much better than myself (!) of how to make things simply look good. How to harness that inbuilt knowledge of *TeX without making it ugly by trying too hard (by manually interfering / customizing) ?

With regard to CV templates, so far I came across hardly any which I find to be both truly beautiful and clear and simple (unpretentious but elegant) at the same time, with but a few exceptions. Plz feel free to reference outstanding CV examples in a comment below! :) Note that I'm not looking for sth fancy/sparkly/don't-know-what-hit-you, but rather for sth with a TeX-like "understatement" ...

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nutty about natty
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  • A CV should be very well-designed; the design should be considered as a whole, rather than a bunch of individual factors. My CV has (fairly) large margins because I used an open design with a lot of whitespace; more intense and visually arresting designs should have very tight margins. – ChrisS Jul 09 '13 at 11:10
  • Ideally CV should focus on content/qualifications/experience targeting prospective employer/s and thereby earn a job. – texenthusiast Jul 09 '13 at 11:11
  • Any CV templates based on (the idea of) booktabs ? – nutty about natty Jul 09 '13 at 11:12
  • booktabs is all about rules in tables; I don't see why you'd want that. I recommend you work out what you want the CV to look like (do a Google Images search for inspiration), and then bring that design to life in LaTeX. – ChrisS Jul 09 '13 at 11:37
  • I really liked koma-moderncvclassic (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/koma-moderncvclassic) In my opinion it has a somewhat compact look with some fancy options to choose. The main reason that I started to use it was because it works very well with biblatex and biber for creating a publications list. – Martin - マーチン Jul 09 '13 at 12:07
  • @Martin What are the margins (top bottom left right) of that CV template ? – nutty about natty Jul 09 '13 at 13:40
  • @nutty I really tried to find it out, but I failed. I just downloaded the template plug-in my data and was baffled that it looked so nice. However, you can completely specify all lengths yourself if you do not like what you get. As I needed a CV on short notice, I was very pleased with this package. I tried a different before (CurVe), but I felt like it does not do the job right. Especially handling a Bibliography is very helpful in this context. – Martin - マーチン Jul 10 '13 at 09:56
  • @Martin Try \usepackage{layout} and \layout{} in the body. – nutty about natty Jul 10 '13 at 10:03
  • I ran what you asked, here are the results: 1 one inch + \hoffset 2 one inch + \voffset 3 \oddsidemargin = -1pt 4 \topmargin = -15pt 5 \headheight = 28pt 6 \headsep = 8pt 7 \textheight = 665pt 8 \textwidth = 441pt 9 \marginparsep = 0pt 10 \marginparwidth = 0pt 11 \footskip = 28pt \marginparpush = 6pt (not shown) \hoffset = 0pt \voffset = 0pt

    \paperwidth = 597pt \paperheight = 845pt

     – Martin - マーチン Jul 10 '13 at 10:10

2 Answers2

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The premise behind the default margins in LaTeX is to keep the number of characters per line relatively short to make reading easier. The default line length works pretty well for reading large blocks of text. A CV doesn't generally have large blocks of text and is rather a long list of "items". The hardest thing for me when "reading" a CV are the line breaks within an item as they make it harder for me to identify the different items. I prefer generous vertical space between items and groups of items. When an item takes more than one line (e.g., a publication citation) I also like hanging indents so that the only thing that starts flush left is a new item (or a separator between groups of items). Based on this philosophy, I like narrow margins to minimize the number of line breaks within an item.

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  • An alternative to hanging indents is to use bullets (e.g. in combination with the enumitem pkg). A common guideline for CVs recommends using 2-3 bullets per "item" (e.g. for explaining what you did or achieved at a given position and/or degree). – nutty about natty Jul 09 '13 at 12:52
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I think it is hard to answer your question because it is naturally a very personal view what "a typographically (and visually) pleasing CV" is. What is pleasing for you must not be for me or someone else.

A CV should give an (short) overview of your person, what you did and perhaps who you are.

In my opinion document class moderncv does a very good job. It gives you a very nice, good looking and easy readable table of all the informations that should be in a cv. It prepares the paper with small margins to present a better looking table. I was asked several times with wich program I did my cv ...

If you have the typographically knowledge you can create an own cv with or without tables to get a very special cv. I saw cv done with powerpoint, with an astonishing paper format, build with a lot of images. They had an wow effect and were unique. They did there job but the creator knows very well what he/she did. If you do not have this knowledge it is better to use a template ...

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