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I am making my Resume using the res.cls document class as found here. I have set the option margin in my \documentclass definition for the \section heads of my Resume to be to the left of the content. As stated in the documentation of res.cls "% margin: the section titles are to the left of the body text." In my "Professional Experience" section of my resume, I have typed raw content. In my "Technical Skills" section below, I have content in a tabular environment. Here is the problem:

Content misalignment

As you can see the content in my Technical Skills section is misaligned from that in the section above. Any idea how I may correct this?

Mensch
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Eric
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  • Replace \begin{tabular}{...} with \begin{tabular}{@{}...}. – Mico Sep 26 '15 at 18:42
  • @Mico unfortunately that did not modify the alignment :( I changed \begin{tabular}{l l} to \begin{tabular}{@{}l l} May I ask what adding @{} should accomplish? – Eric Sep 26 '15 at 18:48
  • Please post the code you use to generate the cv. (The @{} particle serves to suppress the whitespace that's otherwise inserted at the left-hand edge of the tabular environment.) – Mico Sep 26 '15 at 19:06
  • @Mico I take it back! I changed that line on another section without noticing, that works! Thank you so much!! I learnt something too. Want to post the answer and I'll mark it as the answer? Or is that common knowledge and I'm just out of the loop.. – Eric Sep 26 '15 at 19:13
  • The common wisdom is to not use this class anymore. It is old and (de facto, if not de iure) unmaintained. Of course, if it works for your needs, go for it. But you are probably better off using another class or sticking with a basic class like article and setting it up yourself. The virtue of the second choice is that you have much more flexibility in the layout. – jon Sep 26 '15 at 20:26
  • @Eric - Glad this got cleared up. I've posted my comment as an answer, per your suggestion. – Mico Sep 26 '15 at 21:18
  • @jon My original plan was to make my own template, but it seemed to be a large time sink with many caveats to overcome in terms of formatting. With a few tweaks I was able to get this one functioning the way I wanted. – Eric Sep 27 '15 at 02:50
  • I understand. CVs/resumes are a fairly big 'time sink', but they are also a good way to learn a lot of *TeX for what can be a fairly short document (i.e., learning about page layout, margins, tables, lists, bibliography, and so on). When you do have more time, you might consider starting on such a project. Keep res.cls for now, but (slowly) chip away at replacing it with something of your own design. After all, I note that you are listing LaTeX among your 'Technical Skills'! – jon Sep 27 '15 at 02:58
  • @jon Definitely a goal for myself when I find myself with a small amount of free time.. I have a solid grasp on most things in LaTeX (tables, figures, math etc.) but I would love to learn more about page layout and placement of different sections of a document etc. Do you have any recommendations on how to learn more about these topics? I find there's typically 5 ways to do the same thing, but 1 way is the best approach to the problem. It would be good to learn more about the foundation of LaTeX. - Thanks – Eric Sep 27 '15 at 22:20
  • Hmm, well the aesthetic side of things is often best considered by looking at books on typography. I also like to look at books and so on and think about what I like or dislike about their design choices. The document memdesign (used to be part of the memoir manual is worth reading, too. Many of the ConTeXt manuals are worth reading too. For the 'foundations', besides the TeXbook, there's TeX by Topic; for LaTeX, the LaTeX2e file is crucial. For specific elements, the best thing is to experiment with various packages that deal with that element. – jon Sep 27 '15 at 23:17
  • Cheers! And of course, there's some nice layouts here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/1319/8528. (Some may be too much: sometimes good design means being "quietly" good; otherwise you can end up looking like this -- which really is what "cool" graphic design resumes look like....) – jon Sep 29 '15 at 02:21

1 Answers1

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It looks like you have a setup such as 

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\textsl{Communication Protocols:} & I${}^2$C, SPI, USB\\
\textsl{Development Tools:}       & Altium, GCC, ... \\
\end{tabular}

By default, LaTeX inserts vertical whitespace (in the amount of \tabcolsep; default value: 6pt) to the left of the first column and the right of the final column of a tabular environment. To suppress this action, insert @{} (in words: "insert nothing") at the begin of the specification of the tabular layout, i.e., write

\begin{tabular}{@{}ll}
Mico
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