Spanish Resumes Support

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Engineering
  • TeX Live
  • LaTeX
  • Translations
• Look ahead

Introduction

PPResume now supports Spanish resumes.

Let’s take a look first:

English and Spanish are both Indo-European languages and therefore they share some similarities, so most of the common foundations of PPResume can be reused.

However, there are still notable differences between English and Spanish resumes, such as:

• character set
• punctuations
• date
• capitalization rules
• terms and options translations

I’m not going to present all the details in this post—it is boring to do this, you know. Instead, this time we have revised our docs site and list all the details there.

Engineering

As for the engineering details, I can tell that supporting Spanish in PPResume is far more easier than Chinese.

In total, it took me about 2 days to learn the basics of Spanish—mostly the differences between the English and Spanish writing systems. And then another 2 or 3 days for implementation on top of July’s effort for multi languages support.

Basically, to support Spanish, it needs 3 things:

1. prepare the LaTeX environment
2. revise the LaTeX template
3. translations for terms and options

TeX Live

If you are using MacTeX, you do not need to do anything. If you are using Debian/Ubuntu, you will need to install the texlive-lang-spanish package.

apt install -y texlive-lang-spanish

The texlive-lang-spanish package includes the following CTAN packages:

• babel-spanish: Babel support for Spanish
• hyphen-spanish: Spanish hyphenation patterns.

LaTeX

Once we have the necessary packages installed, we then revise the LaTeX template by putting the following snippets in the preamble.

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
% [spanish]{babel} has some conflicting issues with moderncv, ref:
% https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/140161/36007
\usepackage[spanish,es-lcroman]{babel}

Here \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} is super important because it affects the LaTeX hyphenation algorithm for Spanish.

Font encodings are important for more than their rôle in mapping the glyphs of the fonts to be used for typesetting: their glyph tables are also the context in which TeX’s hyphenation algorithm operates.

— LaTeX font encodings

Babel package is also needed with proper options:

The babel package presented in the introduction allows the use of characters from a range of languages and also translates some elements within the document. babel also automatically activates the appropriate hyphenation rules for the language you choose.

International language support

Translations

PPResume uses several hundred predefined terms and options, so we need to translate these terms and options into Spanish and make sure that Spanish capitalization rules are followed.

Check the translations on the docs site for the full list. I am not a Spanish speaker, all my knowledge of Spanish comes from the public internet, so if you find any errors, please help by reporting an issue. Thank you very much!

Look ahead

I am planning to add more language support to PPResume in the near future, just to keep PPResume’s promise—to be the kind of resume builder that provides native support for multi languages. Our next target, the French language.

See you soon!