How to install TeX Live 2012 and moderncv in Ubuntu Precise Pangolin

Time to upgrade you resume/curriculum vitae!

moderncv is a beautiful template for creating resumes (curriculum vitae) in LaTeX. LaTeX is a markup language and also a system designed for generate high quality documents. Almost all scientific papers and most books published nowadays are generated with this system.

You can see an example of a CV using moderncv’s template in Michae’ls Write github.

First, download Michel’s files from his git repository:

git clone https://github.com/mdwrigh2/resume.git

Next, download modernv package from CTAN:

wget ‘http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv.zip'
unzip moderncv.zip

Let’s put Michael and moderncv files together:

cp resume/* cv/
cp moderncv/* cv/
cd cv/

Now, to be able to generate something similar we need to compile Michael’s mwright-resume.tex file to a DVI or PDF using the TeX Live suite.

Sadly the current Ubuntu version (Precise Pangolin) comes with a quite old TeX Live version (2009). To be able to compile Michael’s moderncv template we need to update it to version 2012. Here are the steps to do it according to this thread in the ubuntu forums:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:texlive-backports/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install texlive

Now if we try to compile the document…

latex mwright-resume.tex

… it will shoot this nice error:

Fatal fontspec error: "cannot-use-pdftex"
The fontspec package requires either XeTeX or LuaTeX to function.
You must change your typesetting engine to, e.g., "xelatex" or "lualatex" instead of plain "latex" or "pdflatex".

So let’s try with lualatex:

sudo apt-get install texlive-luatex

Now if we compile the document like this:

lualatex mwright-resume.tex

We will get, among others, a mwright-resume.pdf file filled with Michael’s data.

We just need to edit the original .tex file, set our resume’s data, compile it with lualatex and we will have an awesome designed resume like Michael’s one.