I too took the XeTeX path (see links below), mostly because of the way it can take advantage of the font variants provided by professional typefaces, and because using Modern, as beautiful as it is, feels a bit tacky on a résumé.

My approach was to eschew flexibility (even though LaTeX is amazing at it) in favour of aesthetics. Since I don't plan on updating it for the next few years, I decided to go crazy with tweaking the positioning of things until they fit just right. It would've probably been a bit easier in a DTP app like InDesign, but I try not to use proprietary software if I can help it, and I didn't want to waste time finding out whether Scribus was up to the task.

I'm a bit embarrassed about the source, because I didn't bother with defining styles properly and used quite a few hackish /vspace{}s instead, but it's good enough for a document only I'm going edit.

PDF: https://github.com/downloads/Aramgutang/resume/resume.pdf

Source: https://github.com/Aramgutang/resume/blob/master/resume.tex

I rather like that design. Do you have a source I could look at? I've used LaTeX, but I've been meaning to try XeTeX for a while.

Are there any particular difficulties with switching from LaTeX to XeTeX?

I actually did my resume with LaTeX, but then became too lazy to update it. Now it's somehow a year out of date :P. (A year is a lot of time for a college student...) Seems like the perfect excuse to redo it and a great time to try XeTeX.

I use a similar style and my source is posted online: https://github.com/mdwrigh2/resume

XeTeX is almost completely compatible with PDFLaTeX, which is compatible with LaTeX except when using Postscript tricks (in particular, pstricks).

Actually, xetex-pstricks has been in TeX Live for a long time now. It will not give you all of pstricks in XeLaTeX, but for the simplest needs it's more than sufficient. Microtype is a bigger problem.

Sorry, I'm not really good at responding to comments fast on HN. The source is currently embarrassingly bad as I iterated through different ideas. I'm ...eventually... going to clean it up and put it on github though.

It is based on moderncv, hacked up a bit, but I think that template still looks quite similar to what I have.

Please post the source in rough form anyway...? Your design resonates with me, and I would like to "borrow" it. I can handle cleaning it up on my own, especially in the off-chance that you never get around to it. ;-)

XeTeX is a TeX engine. You'd still be using LaTeX (or more precisely, XeLaTeX) on top of it.

I agree with both the XeTeX and feeling-silly sentiments. Oh well, here's mine: https://github.com/mjball/resume (source and PDF)

Unless it's meant to be printed... I find that font hard to read and pixelated on my 24 inch monitor. The page is magnified 125%.

Really excellent. Just the blue lines seem a tad heavy, but great effect overall..

What are the fonts you are using there, if I might ask?

Serif: Adobe Caslon Pro Sans: Optima LT std