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Topos Uranos
English

Posters, letters and curriculum vitae

Summary

This lesson teaches how to compose three genres that are neither papers nor presentations and that, nonetheless, accompany every academic life: the poster, the letter and the curriculum vitae. From the way a poster is read, standing and at a distance, it deduces the type size the poster needs, and from the proportions of the A series of paper sizes, a way to test it on an ordinary sheet; it presents the poster library of tcolorbox, with its columns, its boxes and its type scale, and names two other classes for the same purpose. It compares the letter class with scrlttr2, from KOMA-Script, and settles the date, salutation and complimentary close in English for the cover letter to a journal, the letter of request and the letter of recommendation. It presents moderncv, its styles and its commands, with the problem it has with Spanish and its remedy, and composes an academic CV whose publications come, filtered by keywords, from the same bibliographic database as the author's articles. It ends with a table that assigns each genre its class.

Learning objectives

  1. Compute the type size of a poster from the distance at which it will be read, and transfer it to a scale mock-up on A-series paper.
  2. Compose a poster with the poster library of tcolorbox, placing its boxes in columns and rows and setting its type scale with a single option.
  3. Choose between letter and scrlttr2, write a letter with each one with date, salutation and complimentary close in English, and translate their commands from one to the other.
  4. Compose a CV with moderncv, explain the error it produces with babel in Spanish and fix it.
  5. Compose an academic CV whose lists of publications are drawn from a bibliographic database with keyword filters, and predict what enters each list.
  6. Choose for each academic genre the class or package that suits it, justifying the choice by the feature that decides it.

One genre, one tool

The classes seen so far serve texts that are read straight through: the paper, the article, the thesis; the previous lesson added the presentation, which is projected. Three other genres are frequently required in academic life and have conventions of their own: the poster, read standing and at a distance at a conference; the letter, which has a sender, a recipient, a date and a complimentary close; and the curriculum vitae, which arranges a career by dates. For each one there is a class or a package that knows those conventions, and what was learned in the previous units (fontspec, babel, lists, biblatex) still holds inside them.