A new style for academic CV in LaTeX

tl;dr

I made a multi-language CV style using moderncv. It automates the build and typesetting of the CV. The repository is hosted here. Happy TeXing.

The problem

In the last couple of years, I had to redo my CV several times, in English and Spanish. And depending on the project or the need for it, I had to remove the publications, or add the projects, or do some other sort of things.

It was painful, prone to error and had to change it every time for both languages. If you have faced that problem too, you can relate to the pain.

The hope

For that reason, I started playing with the idea of building my CV into multiple languages automatically, and with the minimum changes required to do so. And I also wanted to have to do changes in a single file per item, instead of having to go back and forth between files to make sure the items were in sync.

The solution

Then, I started thinking about biblatex and biber. They are powerful tools that may do the job for me. In the end, all the entries in the CV look like a small database of items that should be typeset in a similar fashion.

So that is what I did. I created some custom drivers and macros to typeset a CV in multiple languages using biblatex. The repository is hosted here.

It allows defining all your CV entries in custom .bib files that will hold common academic entries, like your studies, positions, projects, theses you guided, etc.

The project is built around moderncv, and it will work as a style on that template. For now, the project contains only two languages (English and Spanish), but hopefully, it will be extended to others. I still need to patch some of the language settings to make it easier to extend. However, the core is done and working.

If you have struggled with a multi-language CV before, give it a try. If you want to see what it can do, check the final result in here (en) and here (es).

Happy TeXing.