This past week, I spent a number of hours trying to do one thing that I knew could be done, and could have a positive result, but was somewhat frustrating to finally get right. I rebuilt my resume, which I first made and have been maintaining in Microsoft Word for years, in LaTeX.
For those who do not know, LaTeX is a fairly powerful typesetting software that is used for a number of things, such as putting together scientific documents and other published item. The reason is because it is quite flexible and supports a great number of features, characters, and symbols. Of course I was not using many symbols in my resume, but I wanted to try building it LaTeX because I knew it would allow for a more modular design. So, instead of needing to copy and paste experiences in different orders, depending on the position I am applying for, I can just move a couple lines, recompile the document, and I'm done. Also some formatting tricks, like having text split between two, uneven columns can be done automatically by LaTeX, which I have never found a way of doing in Word. Now some things I could not get it to do, but still, it turned out pretty well, and should allow me to do some things more easily. At least it will be easier now that I have it built.
I also took the time to create some modular files I can use and set up some other things for any stories I might release in the future. The formatting is different enough from Word that they end up several pages shorter, but hey, it works and can be read, so I'm not complaining. While I was trying to replicate some of the formatting I was complaining, but I got it done, and it felt good.
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