What is this \' thing in r\'esum\'es?

That's TeX notation.

TeX is a computer typesetting system invented and authored by Donald E. Knuth of Stanford University. It was the late 70's back then. But today it is so popular that practically every physicist, mathematician, etc. who needs to publish papers uses it exclusively. These fine professors say no to the many commercial word processors available to the personal computers. This is not only because TeX is freeware, but also because

  1. TeX is available on many platforms, including Unix, DOS, Mac, OS/2;
  2. TeX allows the user to enter and specify lines after lines of mathematical and other special symbols easily;
  3. TeX thinks that math symbols are an integral part of your document whenever you use math symbols;
  4. Commercial word processors think that math symbols are detached from other parts of your document; the result is ugly disintegration;
  5. Commercial word processors make the user enter mathematical symbols in the way a world-class pianist plays Chopin's Funeral March (i.e., it is hard to do, AND you have to do it slowly, AND when it is done you feel sad).
So if you are a world-class pianist then, sure, go ahead to use those crappy commercial word processors to enter mathematical equations. (Or if you have no more than one equation per ten pages in your document then, fine too.) Otherwise, you need TeX for productivity.

I am studying Mathematics, and I use TeX exclusively for essays (including those without any math stuff), math assignments, math essays, reports containing much math. You know how many math equations there are in each math assignment. (Answer: the whole write-up is full of them.) I can afford to type all of them with the TeX notation. It doesn't take long. Using a commercial word processor takes ten times as long.

I have prepared hehe.tex, a typical file written in TeX notations. It is just an ordinary ASCII file. So to create the file I just used an ordinary text editor. The fun part is the content of the file; a couple of commands (preceded by backslashes) are entered within the file to indicate typesetting actions, math symbols, etc. For example, \sl means to use a slant font, \int is the symbol for integration, etc.

On most systems, the TeX program is available. So you can issue the commands 

    tex hehe.tex
    dvips hehe.dvi
to generate the output in PostScript. Your WWW browser may or may not be able to let you view PostScript file directly. Mosaic knows to spawn an external PS viewer, so you may try hehe.ps. Netscape seem to only let you save it as a file to your own directory. But you can always view GIF pictures right? So here they are: page 1 and page 2.

For more information, try the newsgroup comp.text.tex.

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