% The Joy of TeX
% Michael Stone
% January 22, 2009

<!-- tags: TeX -->

## The Joy of TeX

“To my mind, [Donald Knuth](http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/) really
made something special when he created [TeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX)…”

“How so,” you ask?

“In that he made it possible for generations of mathematician/artists to
indulge their fancy (read “OCD compulsions”) for both mathematically precise
typesetting *and* graphically pleasing layout simultaneously,” I reply.

Take, for example, the “job description lines” in my
[résumé](../../resume/resume.pdf). How did I tell TeX to both left-align the
role and to right-align the dates?

## Glue and Tables

As it happens, I was in the mood for tables, so I made use of TeX’s

1.  `\halign`,
2.  `\hsize`,
3.  `\hfil`, and
4.  `\tabskip`

commands like this:

    \halign to \hsize{#\hfil&, #\hfil\tabskip=0pt plus 1fil&\tabskip=0pt\hfil#\cr#2&#3&#1\cr}

to tell TeX how to build exactly the line that I wanted; namely,

1.  a table (`\halign`) whose width is equal to the current page
    width, `\hsize`,
2.  which consists of two left-justified columns (`#\hfil`) and a
    right-justified column (`\hfil#`),
3.  separated by a single piece of infinitely stretchable “glue”
    (`\tabskip=0pt plus 1fil&\tabskip=0pt`).

Then I pasted my table-generator into my “\\job” macro definition and chose
some cell-specific fonts:

    \def\job#1#2#3{\smallskip \goodbreak {\parindent=0pt 
    \halign to \hsize{\jtf##\hfil&, \jpf##\hfil
    \tabskip=0pt plus 1 fil&\tabskip=0pt\hfil\jdf##\cr#2&#3&#1\cr}}\par}

and peppered the résumé [source code](../../resume/resume.tex) with
eye-pleasing lines like

    \job{March 2008-October 2009}{Release Manager}{One Laptop per Child}

as needed. Neat, huh?

## Appendix

(P.S. - Better solutions are welcome as well; I’m sure there are many.)

(P.P.S. - Credit where credit’s due: I reversed many pretty design ideas from
your résumé, [Scott](http://cscott.net), which is beautiful.)