9 ms·

Why I do my resume in LaTeX

143 points by gnosis 16y ago

jbrennan 16y ago
What I'd like to know is why not just do up the resumé in HTML and style with CSS? I'm not a web designer by any means, but getting a simple style up and running is no big stretch (especially if you're capable of LaTeX markup). To be fair, I still don't have a resumé in HTML (I'd use Markdown), but I haven't needed to update mine in a while. Next time I do, I'm going HTML with a print stylesheet.
- jackowayed 16y ago
  That's what I do: http://danieljackoway.com/resume http://danieljackoway.com/resume It doesn't look very nice when printed/PDFed by printing to PDF.
  - beoba 16y ago
    HN profile link? Do people take this seriously?
    - jackowayed 16y ago
      Some YC companies definitely do. I'd guess that most startups do to an extent.
      - beoba 16y ago
        I think if anything frequent use of HN would reflect poorly on one's productivity.
        jbrennan 16y ago
        The same could be said for someone who says "I read books all the time." You could look at it as someone being unproductive (hey if you're reading a book, you're probably not working!) or you could look at it as someone educating themselves. I've learned a great deal by reading Hacker News.
  - damncabbage 16y ago
    I've found that printing to PDF on OS X produces documents that look great. (Unlike, say, Firefox on Linux, it doesn't add header or footers, the text looks great, and in general doesn't look terrible at all.)
    - jackowayed 16y ago
      The main problem I have is links. The printing to PDF doesn't care about <a> links. It will linkify anything that looks like a URL or an email address, but that means that I have to have JS put the url in, plus it's ugly to have the urls there at all.
      - damncabbage 16y ago
        Wow. It does? That sucks. As far as links go, I already treat the resume like a print document; all the URLs are written out explicitly, have their own lines where appropriate. (I guess that's why I haven't run into the problem yet.)
      - robert-boehnke 16y ago
        Not sure I understood you correctly, but have you tried using css? <style type="text/css" media="print"> a:link, a:visited { color: black; text-decoration: none; } a:link:after, a:visited:after { content: " (" attr(href) ") "; } </style>
    - bzbarsky 16y ago
      The headers and footers are optional. In my Linux Firefox, if I go to the File menu, select the Print option, go to the "Options" tab, there's a whole "Header and Footer" section where you can set them to whatever you want, including "--blank--". Details of this print dialog might, of course, depend on your GNOME version, your distribution, and the time of month, like everything on Linux. Now the quality of the text is a separate issue; I haven't actually done any printing from a web browser on Linux in a few years, so I have no idea what that looks like nowadays.
- daleharvey 16y ago
  Yeh I was wondering what I should do my resume in sometime last year, decided html was the best format for me. http://daleharvey.org/ http://daleharvey.org/
  - damncabbage 16y ago
    Hello! I saw your resume when looking around a couple of months ago. I thought it looked great, and ended up using the general layout as, uh, inspiration: http://robhoward.id.au/resume/ http://robhoward.id.au/resume/
- buymorechuck 16y ago
  http://www.satine.org/resume/ http://www.satine.org/resume/ Mine has been in HTML + CSS since about 1998 (over 12 years now, back then it was "XHTML") with CSS print styles. Everything inlined and very compact. Works great.
  - microarchitect 16y ago
    That's a pretty impressive resume. Is it ok to steal your design?
    - phlux 16y ago
      Just make sure you put "design stealing" on your version of the resume.
  - kylec 16y ago
    Looks good, but having your email as "myfirstname /dot/ mylastname [at] gmail" is a bit tacky and unprofessional. GMail has decent spam filtering, why not just publish your address normally?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  1) HTML pages are not inherently printer-friendly 2) LaTeX is a text formatting language. It can be argued HTML is (fundamentally) also a text formatting language, but if you submit a resume to me styled with HTML and CSS using colors and graphics and drop shadows, I will personally burn your resume, damn the consequences.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    What about adding a CSS style with the 'print' media type? I'd still use LaTeX, though. Media types are just a really cool trick...
  - rimantas 16y ago
    HTML is printer (output in general, be it screen, print or aural) agnostic. At least it should be. I also have my CV as HTML with print CSS. Print to PDF, send, done. Sure, LaTeX is much more powerful, but I am not sure how much does that matter for a simple text document, without any maths notation.
  - jarek 16y ago
    And if someone submits a PDF resume using colours and graphics and drop shadows you'll hire them enthusiastically? - Guy who is interested in this issue as his resume is HTML but without drop shadows
  - jbrennan 16y ago
    You're right, HTML itself isn't printer friendly, but it's really only a semantic document. It's up to you to style it with a print stylesheet. And of course, I wouldn't use CSS to colour everything and add gradients and all that junk. The goal is simply to create a nice layout in a format that doesn't depend on MS Word or LaTeX (which, nice though it may be, is alien to most and also not as commonly installed as a web browser). And naturally, I'd print-to-PDF before sending off to a recruiter. Mac OS X Print-To-PDF is really quite lovely.
- sabj 16y ago
  I have an online version of my resume which is precisely this, though not as custom-done as the rest of my homepage. But I used this lovely template: http://sampleresumetemplate.net/ http://sampleresumetemplate.net/ and edited as necessary. I would love to put my resume into LaTeX, if I had a simple way to do so. Unfortunately, it would be a pretty painful process, and not something for which I have currently budgeted the time. I will check out some of these templates and frameworks mentioned in the future. For now, though, since I haven't even started my new job yet, not an especially urgent project : )
  - ajays 16y ago
    Actually, it is not painful at all. You just need the right style file. Then you place your text in various sections, and LaTeX formats it perfectly for you. I love LaTeX. While I'm on the topic: slides (presentation) done via LaTeX (and in PDF) look simply _amazing_. Powerpoint has _nothing_ on LaTeX + PDF.
    - Derbasti 16y ago
      Strange that you would say such a thing. I think slides in LaTeX look awful. They all look the same, there is never any transition or animation (which can be very useful) and since adding images is kind of painful in LaTeX, there are usually very few images. Most of the time, LaTeX presentations are just bullet points on a semi-nice background. Seriously, I have seen plenty of talks on plenty of conferences and events and the ones done with LaTeX always stood out as the most boring (-looking) ones.
      - tincholio 16y ago
        You seem to be unaware of Beamer
        Derbasti 16y ago
        Quite on the contrary: I am actually talking about Beamer. Maybe I was just extremely unlucky to only see really bad presentations, but I have not seen any beautiful presentation in Latex beamer and many great ones using Powerpoint or Keynote or some other tool.
- john2x 16y ago
  This is what I do (Markdown ftw). I don't know how it looks printed though, so I have a .doc version for that.
- sofuture 16y ago
  My CV is XML and XSLT, and I don't print it to a PDF -- anyone unable to click a link to it, is probably not someone I want to work for (sure, there are exceptions, but...)
- Sidnicious 16y ago
  I think this hits it dead on. In many ways, HTML is the people's LaTeX. Here's mine: http://sidneysm.com/resume/ http://sidneysm.com/resume/ The content of the résumé is JSON data (http://sidneysm.com/resume/resume.json http://sidneysm.com/resume/resume.json) with some embedded Markdown, and it's transformed into an HTML document by a JavaScript tempting library I hacked up on top of jquery-haml.
tedunangst 16y ago
Personally, I find a latex resume comes across as pretentious if it's your only latex publication, which is usually easy to determine from its contents.
- angrycoder 16y ago
  I don't think that word means what you think it means. I might consider it pretentious if the resume was written with a dip pen on parchment embossed with the family crest. Taking a simple task like writing a document in Word and using it as an excuse to learn a text formatting language sounds perfectly reasonable for a hacker.
  - sabj 16y ago
    Furthermore, the fact that a resume is written in LaTeX doesn't mean you publish it that way. If you have really great-looking PDFs that you send out, who's to care? When I send out my resume, I only send PDFs etc anyway, unless explicitly requested otherwise. Can't trust recipient clients. Not that you always can with PDF, either...
    - burgerbrain 16y ago
      I've had interviewers recognize my use of LaTeX on hardcopies of my resume by recognizing Computer Modern.
      - beoba 16y ago
        Another telltale sign are the default margins, though I spose someone would sooner change the margins than change the font.
  - tedunangst 16y ago
    I double checked. pretentious, adj. Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed Learning latex because you're curious is one thing. Using latex on your resume solely to give the impression you know latex would qualify as "affecting greater talent than is actually possessed".
jayzee 16y ago
I do it because I can add my papers to a global bib file and then just \cite them easily
burgerbrain 16y ago
I do it because: It looks baller, I get positive comments on it in my interviews every time, and it's easier than using Word. Why typeset when computers can for you?
- gnosis 16y ago
  I've never fretted over and spent so much time on minutia of typesetting as I have with LaTeX. I suppose it's fine if you're satisfied with some default look that someone else has come up with for your document. But for me that's never good enough. I want my documents to look a certain way, and it's virtually never the case that any LaTeX class or document style looks good enough with the default settings. So I wind up doing endless tweaking until finally it looks the way I want it to. Of course, by then it does look brilliant. And the time spent is well worth it. But you do have to put in the time to get these kinds of results, if the default settings don't suit you.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    See the section "Format once, change the content a lot" in the article. (particularly important with resumes) If that's not true in your case, you're almost by definition using LaTeX incorrectly.
    - gnosis 16y ago
      "Format once, change the content a lot" That assumes a number of things: First, it assumes that at some point you'll settle on some perfect formatting for all time. That's really unlikely (especially for me). Second, it assumes that the same resume format is appropriate for each prospective employer you'll be sending your resume to. There are many who feel you should tailor your resume to the employer you're sending it to. That could certainly include tailoring the format, depending on how different the jobs you're applying for are. A resume for a web design job might look very different from one for a programming job. And many people do both. Third, it assumes your LaTeX skills will never improve and you'll never discover new styles or fonts or tricks you'll want to apply to your resume to make it better in the future. Things you didn't know at the time you first wrote it. All these are potentially incorrect assumptions. There are some great reasons to keep tinkering with the formatting, even in LaTeX. That said, I never implied in my original post that the reason that I spent a lot of time futzing with the formatting in LaTeX was because I was re-formatting stuff I'd already formatted to my satisfaction once. No. In fact, it took a long time to format it in the first place. Yes, it's true that maybe this will save me time and grief in the long run (if I can let sleeping dogs lie, and not try to improve the formatting once I've settled on one I like), but maybe not. Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anyone to ditch LaTeX and switch to Word. I love LaTeX. And I hate it. It's a love/hate thing. There are some really great things about it. It can make your documents look marvelous, and you can do some amazing things with it. But it can also be very frustrating (especially if you want to do stuff that's non-standard, and varies too far from the defaults that the (often broken) document classes had in mind when they were written).
deleted 16y ago
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jefe78 16y ago
I have to admit, when I saw this I went looking for resume examples in LaTeX and I was impressed. I'm downloading Lyx right now(Linux high-level LaTeX front-end) and intend to redo my resume...and I'm not even looking for work! Its that appealing.
misterm 16y ago
So I'm on Linux - specifically Debian. Where do I start with LaTeX? Do I have to use a specially created editor such as Lyx?
- gnosis 16y ago
  No, you don't need any special editor. In fact, I wouldn't recommend using one, as all the special editors are really just a crutch. It's much better to learn how to program the underlying LaTeX itself, rather than rely on some high-level tool to do it for you. (just my opinion here) There are an absolute glut of LaTeX tutorials out there to get you started. Here's one: http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/index.html http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/index.html But there are many, many others. Some are particularly good for people in certain specialties. For instance, here's an excellent LaTeX resource for logicians: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/logicmatters/l4llogiciansnew.html http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/logicmatters/...
  - apl 16y ago
    Ha. I remember Smith being ridiculously adamant about everybody using LaTeX for their essays and logic stuff...
- elehack 16y ago
  You can use a wysiwyg-ish editor like LyX or TeXmacs, but eventually, you'll likely want formatting it doesn't make trivial, particularly for something like a resume. If you're comfortable with Vim or Emacs, both of them have good LaTeX support. The AucTeX package for Emacs is particularly excellent (it needs to be installed separately, but Debian packages it). There are also editors best described as "LaTeX IDEs". They provide a syntax-highlighting editor and have particular support for running the LaTeX processing toolchain, parsing error messages and warnings (a nontrivial proposition), and sometimes provide support for generating LaTeX code snippets like table layouts. One such package is Texmaker, a Qt-based IDE with a look-and-feel somewhat like Qt Creator.
- tkahn6 16y ago
  gedit has a LaTeX plugin which is what I use. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gedit-latex-plugin http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gedit-latex-plugi...
adulau 16y ago
In the same idea, there are the nice looking resume template from Dario Taraborelli: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex (Typesetting your academic CV in LaTeX). If you want your CV not to be seen in the crowd: the Europass CV LaTeX template http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/europecv.html http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/europ... ....
goalieca 16y ago
I have a latex resume and I run into a few problems. Some companies/agencies only accept .doc formats. The latex2rtf or latex2txt is also error-prone. But, my resume looks awesome and it's easy to move things around/add things without any formatting. I haven't touched formatting in 5 years or so.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I used a latex class to format one of my papers. At the final date of submission I found out they except only .doc format. I am still looking desperately for a latex2doc converter. Anyone here knows about this?
  - gnosis 16y ago
    You could try asking on #latex on freenode. But, from what I remember, there aren't any. Or at least not any that do a passable job. One sort of hackish thing you could try is simply printing out your resume and scanning it in. Then import the scanned pages as images directly in to the Word document. It will technically be in Word format, and may even look nice when printed (assuming you've scanned your printouts in at a high enough resolution). Though, of course, the text won't be editable.
    - bzbarsky 16y ago
      Under the assumption that the paper in question is being published in a journal, that might be a bad idea. In my experience, journals will typically take your content and then reformat it themselves to fit in whatever their constraints are (page size, number of columns, possibly starting in the middle of a page, etc, etc). For journals that take LaTeX submissions, they will generally just apply their house style file. For journals that take Word submissions, they will generally just apply their house Word style. For journals that accept either one... see above. ;)
  - buster 16y ago
    There is latex 2 odt. Might be a starting point.
finemann 16y ago
There is a very nice LaTeX class than can be used to make beautiful resume's: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/ http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/modernc... See sample resume's here: http://www.math.uic.edu/~hurder/math589/vita.html http://www.math.uic.edu/~hurder/math589/vita.html
ztan 16y ago
I use jobspice.com and call it a day.
bluesmoon 16y ago
The last job I applied to, I sent a plain text resume and they were impressed. Since then I've just kept my LinkedIn profile up to date and get a PDF from that to send out (believe it or not, I need to send a resume to HR if I want to change departments within the company).
bsergean 16y ago
The day I converted my latex resume to pure HTML plus some embedded CSS, I was really pleased. At least I understand HTML layout while latex was this magic black box that I didn't understand at all. Plus if you pick a nice font like Georgia it will look a bit like latex. http://jeanserge.com/resume.html http://jeanserge.com/resume.html
ranchev 16y ago
Nice to see that others do it too! The real problem I have seen with resumes in PDF format is that most companies (actually mostly agencies) tend to ask for .doc files. In fact a lot of their online application process requires .doc files. I have a very simple solution - avoid applying there! Often people who tend to write their resumes in LaTeX would find most of these jobs less than acceptable anyways. When exceptions are required I extract a text version of the resume latex2 rtf/txt/html (or combination) tend to work ok. The rtf and text can easily be saved as .doc. Of course thing are never going to be as pretty as the PDF (but then again these job applications are rarely priorities) Here is a sample derived from my resume: http://ranchev.net/latex http://ranchev.net/latex
- gnosis 16y ago
  "...a lot of their online application process requires .doc files. I have a very simple solution - avoid applying there!" Amen to that. If more people voted with their feet when companies pull this sort of crap, the world would be much better place.
- meatmanek 16y ago
  Despite asking me for a .doc, Microsoft didn't complain when I sent them a PDF (of my LaTeX-typeset résumé, of course).
Osmose 16y ago
As this is turning into a "What do you use?" thread: I use Publisher. I can precisely position everything on my resume, align it to a grid, etc. And if an employer only accepts doc files, it's trivial to copy-paste the file contents to Word and reposition them correctly.
e-dard 16y ago
Is it weird that I was very surprised that anybody writes anything important in anything other than LaTeX??
neild 16y ago
I use ASCII. Everyone can read it, I can paste it into emails, and I waste no time fiddling around with formatting on a document that will just be scanned for a few keywords and discarded.
- retroafroman 16y ago
  When I was applying at many of the big engineering firms last year, several of them wanted a copy pasted, text only version of my resume. Maintaining a copy of the resume in good plaintext form is always a bonus. Well worth the slight bother when updating.
  - billswift 16y ago
    Another advantage to keeping a plaintext copy is that it can be quickly formatted however an employer may require it.
- sixtofour 16y ago
  I sent a resume in ascii, resume.txt, to a company's HR dept. They asked me to send them a .doc Word version. I changed the suffix on my file from .txt to .doc, sent them essentially the exact same file. It opened for them in Word because of the suffix, they were happy and I was then interviewed and hired. That still makes me smile, these many years gone by.
liljimmytables 16y ago
As a great fan of latex, I would LOVE to use it to format my CV. But here in Britain there are far too many HR departments and agencies who will look at your pdf and say "I'm sorry, could you send the original Word doc?" Not that recruiters are always the best way to get a job, but it would be silly to write them out of my searches
- marcog1 16y ago
  I've had that before. I sent them the latex source and they've been able to handle the rest.
starpilot 16y ago
I just use Word. It's easy, I know it already, and it looks nice: http://readlt.com/r.png http://readlt.com/r.png. Template if anyone's interested: http://readlt.com/resume-template.doc http://readlt.com/resume-template.doc
- lkozma 16y ago
  It looks decent, I agree, but from typographic point of view, it looks lower visual quality than LaTeX-produced text. Look at how the letters seem to be unevenly aligned to the line, and the spacing between them is also not quite right. See for example [something cool] in your screenshot. The first bracket is miles away from the s, the closing bracket is stuck to the l. EDIT: another issue further down: compare Sed and Vestibulum. In the latter the e looks way too far from the initial letter. More careful kerning would push the e a bit under V's wings. I realize it's not the most important thing in the world, but still :) Anyway, I don't claim to be an expert in typography at all, that's why I also use LaTeX for my CV: http://www.lkozma.net/cv_kl.pdf http://www.lkozma.net/cv_kl.pdf
  - starpilot 16y ago
    I think that's just funky MS Word font rendering at low zoom settings. Zooming up removes that artifact, and the PDF doesn't display it like that at all. Certainly the actual spacing of the characters is fine, shown in PDF and printed versions.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    Two pages?
    - apl 16y ago
      That's not a résumé, it's an (academic) CV. They have a tendency to be long; our faculty head's, for instance, has 39 pages.
  - kleiba 16y ago
    No wonder you became a computer scientist -- with that name! ;-)
malbertife 16y ago
I use org-mode in Emacs: it's the fastest and most convenient way of editing a document's structure I've found so far, and I find myself doing that a lot with my resume. Then I export to LaTeX, HTML, or plain text.
- reneky 16y ago
  How does the org -> latex -> pdf look in the end? Could you post it?
  - malbertife 16y ago
    It contains my home address, mobile number and so on, so I'd rather not post it. But it looks like a plain article class LaTeX document, except that I changed the margins and the font (Palatino instead of Times). If you want a more sophisticated layout you can customize the LaTeX-specific options; they'll be ignored when you export to other formats.
chris_j 16y ago
He posted a follow up with a LaTeX resume template here: http://www.toofishes.net/blog/latex-resume-follow-up/ http://www.toofishes.net/blog/latex-resume-follow-up/ I must confess that I don't understand it well but it has inspired me to actually try LaTeX for the first time. (EDIT - fixed dumb typo. Thanks, RiderOfGiraffes)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Er, s/temple/template/ ??
iuguy 16y ago
If you're ever planning on sending your CV to a recruiter, don't use LaTeX. Recruiters (reputation for being upgraded estate agents and scum of the earth aside) will want to remove any contact details from your CV to ensure that their client doesn't attempt to contact you except through them. This is why they'll push for word document versions. You might think, "Oh, well I'll just find a recruiter that won't do this" but depending on your chosen profession this may be harder than you think. You might think, "Ok, well I'll just create a PDF version without contact details on it" but that's not enough, because some recruiters actually don't put people forward because they sent PDFs, while telling them that they're putting them forward - the reason being that you're at the back of the queue not because of ability but because you're 'difficult' or they're not able to stick the recruiters logo on or easily paste into their template. Now if none of this is an issue for you, feel free to go ahead and submit a latex generated pdf. Sadly, Word is the lingua franca of recruitment. I've had two guys interview with me independently of a recruiter for positions after said recruiter told them they'd put them forward when they didn't - in both cases the used a Latex CV. Finally, formatting is relevant only to a point - if you've got experience in your field then that trumps any formatting. I've hired guys who use comic sans in their CV because they were bloody brilliant, not because they were funny.
- chris_j 16y ago
  OK, here's a question: why do companies use recruitment consultants? I've never heard a nice word said about them, certainly not in the tech/IT field. Not by people who work for companies hiring, not by jobs applicants. What value do they add, other than going through a big pile of CVs/resumes and turning it into a smaller pile of CVs/resumes (and, by the sounds of things, likely tossing out a whole load of excellent candidates in many cases)?
  - iuguy 16y ago
    A recruiter would be better positioned to add value than I. I've dealt with recruiters on an employer and employee basis and it generally varies massively as to what you get. Out of all the recruiters I've known, there's only one that I have a long term relationship and would consider a friend. That's not a positive note for an industry, given that I've led recruitment in about 4 different jobs across two industries. If you imagine a pre-Internet world, recruiters would provide employers value by having a large potential labour pool, searching that pool for 'talent', then (allegedly) doing some sort of screening so that HR gets CVs that are relevant to the post. In the modern age, much of this could be bypassed but some companies (most notably larger companies) have exclusive contracts with large recruiters, meaning that if you want to work there you have to go through a specific recruiter. Madness, I know, and an industry ripe for disruption but full of people that would fight tooth and nail against it (and not just the recruiters but the employers in some cases).
daniel-cussen 16y ago
You can use http://www.scribtex.com http://www.scribtex.com to design latex documents, too.
dscape 16y ago
If anyone is interested been doing this for ages. You can get the template by git clone git://github.com/dscape/NunoJobResume.git
moe 16y ago
LaTeX needs a modern successor. Yes, the output looks \bf{gorgeous}. But the underlying toolchain and language are past their expiration date. By far. Tasks as simple as "let's add an image here" or "let's move this to the left a little" frequently turn into hour-long journeys deep down into the guts of a 30 year old codebase. There is no reason why a modern tool couldn't use the same algorithms to create equally beautiful output. We're not writing raw postscript to talk to our printers anymore either. \end{rant}
- justincormack 16y ago
  LuaTeX looks promising, embedding Lua as a scripting language over the underlying algorithms.
  - chalst 16y ago
    Luatex is the successor implementation to Pdftex, and it works very well: Context Mk.4 is written as a mixture of Tex and Lua, and is a much cleaner code base than Latex2e. Pdftex is currently the standard Tex engine for the two main Tex distributions, Texlive and Miktex.
- pdw 16y ago
  TeXmacs aims to be such a tool.
  - chalst 16y ago
    I have the impression that Texmacs has about as much momentum behind it as Gnu Hurd.
- larsberg 16y ago
  Past their expiration date? What about having to do the following every time you add/change a references seems outdated? pdflatex paper && bibtex paper && pdflatex paper && pdflatex paper :-) TBH, though, there's just no comparison for producing nicely-formatted research papers. Especially in that eye-straining, dual-column, 9pt ACM conference format.
bgentry 16y ago
Before my most recent job search (~4 mo. ago) I finally invested the time and effort to break free of Word docs and switch to LaTeX. Honestly, I spent about a week relearning the basic syntax (it's been years) and learning how to do much more advanced formatting than I had done before. The effort I put in was worth every single minute. I started with a fairly advanced template and tweaked the hell out of it until I was satisfied with the end result. I now have a resume that is: 1) version controlled in git as text/code (don't underestimate how cool this is) 2) very simple to update or add sections to without worrying about breaking Word's formatting 3) looks stunning, imho 4) got me callbacks from nearly every place I applied to. I feel like the eye-catching resume was a huge part of this You write code all day long.. formatting a document with it just makes so much more sense once you make the initial time investment. If a recruiter or job site can't handle the PDF, I don't want to work with them anyway.
ohkine 16y ago
I don't understand the appeal. Every single LaTeX-based CV looks exactly the same. The same mediocre serif fonts, the same structure, the same basic layout in every way. I guess there is something to be said for the 'classic' way of doing things -- i'm not saying it's bad per se -- but i certainly don't find it novel or particularly 'gorgeous'. As far as the ease of use and the typography functions, i find Pages (from the iWork suite) to be more than adequate. The layout that he did would have taken me only moments to re-create in Pages, and although LaTeX has some advanced typography features that Pages and OS X don't, the latter seems sufficient to me for just about anyone's CV.
trey 16y ago
I just re-did my resume using indeed.com's resume uploader. It gives you a nice clean formatted resume that you can share publicly, export to .pdf, or email. I don't really see a point in using latex, with these new tools available. I think linkedin has a resume upload and maybe branchout does as well if you are more of the social networking type.
billmcneale 16y ago
This guy needs to spend a few more years in this industry, he will realize that as long as your résumé doesn't contain typos, nobody cares what it looks like. Hell, I even review résumés that are text files. The faster I can access it and read the important stuff, the happier I am. I couldn't care less if it's using TeX, LaTeX, Word, PDF or HTML, and I will probably even ding you if you brag because you used LaTeX to write it, because you're using tools that are twenty years old.
billmcneale 16y ago
If his résumé is so good, why isn't it available on his web site? "Contact me by email and let me know a good reason you'd like to see it and I'll be happy to send a copy along to you." Sure, I will try to convince you that I want to see your résumé because your skills look like a good match for a position I'm trying to fill. Except I don't know your skills because... I don't have access to your résumé. Talk about some ego.
- pangram 16y ago
  He is perhaps trying to avoid aggressive recruiters.

143 points by gnosis 16y ago

What I'd like to know is why not just do up the resumé in HTML and style with CSS? I'm not a web designer by any means, but getting a simple style up and running is no big stretch (especially if you're capable of LaTeX markup). To be fair, I still don't have a resumé in HTML (I'd use Markdown), but I haven't needed to update mine in a while. Next time I do, I'm going HTML with a print stylesheet.

jackowayed 16y ago
That's what I do: http://danieljackoway.com/resume http://danieljackoway.com/resume It doesn't look very nice when printed/PDFed by printing to PDF.
- beoba 16y ago
  HN profile link? Do people take this seriously?
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    Some YC companies definitely do. I'd guess that most startups do to an extent.
    - beoba 16y ago
      I think if anything frequent use of HN would reflect poorly on one's productivity.
      - jbrennan 16y ago
        The same could be said for someone who says "I read books all the time." You could look at it as someone being unproductive (hey if you're reading a book, you're probably not working!) or you could look at it as someone educating themselves. I've learned a great deal by reading Hacker News.
- damncabbage 16y ago
  I've found that printing to PDF on OS X produces documents that look great. (Unlike, say, Firefox on Linux, it doesn't add header or footers, the text looks great, and in general doesn't look terrible at all.)
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    The main problem I have is links. The printing to PDF doesn't care about <a> links. It will linkify anything that looks like a URL or an email address, but that means that I have to have JS put the url in, plus it's ugly to have the urls there at all.
    - damncabbage 16y ago
      Wow. It does? That sucks. As far as links go, I already treat the resume like a print document; all the URLs are written out explicitly, have their own lines where appropriate. (I guess that's why I haven't run into the problem yet.)
    - robert-boehnke 16y ago
      Not sure I understood you correctly, but have you tried using css? <style type="text/css" media="print"> a:link, a:visited { color: black; text-decoration: none; } a:link:after, a:visited:after { content: " (" attr(href) ") "; } </style>
  - bzbarsky 16y ago
    The headers and footers are optional. In my Linux Firefox, if I go to the File menu, select the Print option, go to the "Options" tab, there's a whole "Header and Footer" section where you can set them to whatever you want, including "--blank--". Details of this print dialog might, of course, depend on your GNOME version, your distribution, and the time of month, like everything on Linux. Now the quality of the text is a separate issue; I haven't actually done any printing from a web browser on Linux in a few years, so I have no idea what that looks like nowadays.
daleharvey 16y ago
Yeh I was wondering what I should do my resume in sometime last year, decided html was the best format for me. http://daleharvey.org/ http://daleharvey.org/
- damncabbage 16y ago
  Hello! I saw your resume when looking around a couple of months ago. I thought it looked great, and ended up using the general layout as, uh, inspiration: http://robhoward.id.au/resume/ http://robhoward.id.au/resume/
buymorechuck 16y ago
http://www.satine.org/resume/ http://www.satine.org/resume/ Mine has been in HTML + CSS since about 1998 (over 12 years now, back then it was "XHTML") with CSS print styles. Everything inlined and very compact. Works great.
- microarchitect 16y ago
  That's a pretty impressive resume. Is it ok to steal your design?
  - phlux 16y ago
    Just make sure you put "design stealing" on your version of the resume.
- kylec 16y ago
  Looks good, but having your email as "myfirstname /dot/ mylastname [at] gmail" is a bit tacky and unprofessional. GMail has decent spam filtering, why not just publish your address normally?
sliverstorm 16y ago
1) HTML pages are not inherently printer-friendly 2) LaTeX is a text formatting language. It can be argued HTML is (fundamentally) also a text formatting language, but if you submit a resume to me styled with HTML and CSS using colors and graphics and drop shadows, I will personally burn your resume, damn the consequences.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  What about adding a CSS style with the 'print' media type? I'd still use LaTeX, though. Media types are just a really cool trick...
- rimantas 16y ago
  HTML is printer (output in general, be it screen, print or aural) agnostic. At least it should be. I also have my CV as HTML with print CSS. Print to PDF, send, done. Sure, LaTeX is much more powerful, but I am not sure how much does that matter for a simple text document, without any maths notation.
- jarek 16y ago
  And if someone submits a PDF resume using colours and graphics and drop shadows you'll hire them enthusiastically? - Guy who is interested in this issue as his resume is HTML but without drop shadows
- jbrennan 16y ago
  You're right, HTML itself isn't printer friendly, but it's really only a semantic document. It's up to you to style it with a print stylesheet. And of course, I wouldn't use CSS to colour everything and add gradients and all that junk. The goal is simply to create a nice layout in a format that doesn't depend on MS Word or LaTeX (which, nice though it may be, is alien to most and also not as commonly installed as a web browser). And naturally, I'd print-to-PDF before sending off to a recruiter. Mac OS X Print-To-PDF is really quite lovely.
sabj 16y ago
I have an online version of my resume which is precisely this, though not as custom-done as the rest of my homepage. But I used this lovely template: http://sampleresumetemplate.net/ http://sampleresumetemplate.net/ and edited as necessary. I would love to put my resume into LaTeX, if I had a simple way to do so. Unfortunately, it would be a pretty painful process, and not something for which I have currently budgeted the time. I will check out some of these templates and frameworks mentioned in the future. For now, though, since I haven't even started my new job yet, not an especially urgent project : )
- ajays 16y ago
  Actually, it is not painful at all. You just need the right style file. Then you place your text in various sections, and LaTeX formats it perfectly for you. I love LaTeX. While I'm on the topic: slides (presentation) done via LaTeX (and in PDF) look simply _amazing_. Powerpoint has _nothing_ on LaTeX + PDF.
  - Derbasti 16y ago
    Strange that you would say such a thing. I think slides in LaTeX look awful. They all look the same, there is never any transition or animation (which can be very useful) and since adding images is kind of painful in LaTeX, there are usually very few images. Most of the time, LaTeX presentations are just bullet points on a semi-nice background. Seriously, I have seen plenty of talks on plenty of conferences and events and the ones done with LaTeX always stood out as the most boring (-looking) ones.
    - tincholio 16y ago
      You seem to be unaware of Beamer
      - Derbasti 16y ago
        Quite on the contrary: I am actually talking about Beamer. Maybe I was just extremely unlucky to only see really bad presentations, but I have not seen any beautiful presentation in Latex beamer and many great ones using Powerpoint or Keynote or some other tool.
john2x 16y ago
This is what I do (Markdown ftw). I don't know how it looks printed though, so I have a .doc version for that.
sofuture 16y ago
My CV is XML and XSLT, and I don't print it to a PDF -- anyone unable to click a link to it, is probably not someone I want to work for (sure, there are exceptions, but...)
Sidnicious 16y ago
I think this hits it dead on. In many ways, HTML is the people's LaTeX. Here's mine: http://sidneysm.com/resume/ http://sidneysm.com/resume/ The content of the résumé is JSON data (http://sidneysm.com/resume/resume.json http://sidneysm.com/resume/resume.json) with some embedded Markdown, and it's transformed into an HTML document by a JavaScript tempting library I hacked up on top of jquery-haml.

tedunangst 16y ago

Personally, I find a latex resume comes across as pretentious if it's your only latex publication, which is usually easy to determine from its contents.

angrycoder 16y ago
I don't think that word means what you think it means. I might consider it pretentious if the resume was written with a dip pen on parchment embossed with the family crest. Taking a simple task like writing a document in Word and using it as an excuse to learn a text formatting language sounds perfectly reasonable for a hacker.
- sabj 16y ago
  Furthermore, the fact that a resume is written in LaTeX doesn't mean you publish it that way. If you have really great-looking PDFs that you send out, who's to care? When I send out my resume, I only send PDFs etc anyway, unless explicitly requested otherwise. Can't trust recipient clients. Not that you always can with PDF, either...
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    I've had interviewers recognize my use of LaTeX on hardcopies of my resume by recognizing Computer Modern.
    - beoba 16y ago
      Another telltale sign are the default margins, though I spose someone would sooner change the margins than change the font.
- tedunangst 16y ago
  I double checked. pretentious, adj. Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed Learning latex because you're curious is one thing. Using latex on your resume solely to give the impression you know latex would qualify as "affecting greater talent than is actually possessed".

jayzee 16y ago

I do it because I can add my papers to a global bib file and then just \cite them easily

burgerbrain 16y ago

I do it because: It looks baller, I get positive comments on it in my interviews every time, and it's easier than using Word. Why typeset when computers can for you?

gnosis 16y ago
I've never fretted over and spent so much time on minutia of typesetting as I have with LaTeX. I suppose it's fine if you're satisfied with some default look that someone else has come up with for your document. But for me that's never good enough. I want my documents to look a certain way, and it's virtually never the case that any LaTeX class or document style looks good enough with the default settings. So I wind up doing endless tweaking until finally it looks the way I want it to. Of course, by then it does look brilliant. And the time spent is well worth it. But you do have to put in the time to get these kinds of results, if the default settings don't suit you.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  See the section "Format once, change the content a lot" in the article. (particularly important with resumes) If that's not true in your case, you're almost by definition using LaTeX incorrectly.
  - gnosis 16y ago
    "Format once, change the content a lot" That assumes a number of things: First, it assumes that at some point you'll settle on some perfect formatting for all time. That's really unlikely (especially for me). Second, it assumes that the same resume format is appropriate for each prospective employer you'll be sending your resume to. There are many who feel you should tailor your resume to the employer you're sending it to. That could certainly include tailoring the format, depending on how different the jobs you're applying for are. A resume for a web design job might look very different from one for a programming job. And many people do both. Third, it assumes your LaTeX skills will never improve and you'll never discover new styles or fonts or tricks you'll want to apply to your resume to make it better in the future. Things you didn't know at the time you first wrote it. All these are potentially incorrect assumptions. There are some great reasons to keep tinkering with the formatting, even in LaTeX. That said, I never implied in my original post that the reason that I spent a lot of time futzing with the formatting in LaTeX was because I was re-formatting stuff I'd already formatted to my satisfaction once. No. In fact, it took a long time to format it in the first place. Yes, it's true that maybe this will save me time and grief in the long run (if I can let sleeping dogs lie, and not try to improve the formatting once I've settled on one I like), but maybe not. Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anyone to ditch LaTeX and switch to Word. I love LaTeX. And I hate it. It's a love/hate thing. There are some really great things about it. It can make your documents look marvelous, and you can do some amazing things with it. But it can also be very frustrating (especially if you want to do stuff that's non-standard, and varies too far from the defaults that the (often broken) document classes had in mind when they were written).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jefe78 16y ago

I have to admit, when I saw this I went looking for resume examples in LaTeX and I was impressed. I'm downloading Lyx right now(Linux high-level LaTeX front-end) and intend to redo my resume...and I'm not even looking for work! Its that appealing.

misterm 16y ago

So I'm on Linux - specifically Debian. Where do I start with LaTeX? Do I have to use a specially created editor such as Lyx?

gnosis 16y ago
No, you don't need any special editor. In fact, I wouldn't recommend using one, as all the special editors are really just a crutch. It's much better to learn how to program the underlying LaTeX itself, rather than rely on some high-level tool to do it for you. (just my opinion here) There are an absolute glut of LaTeX tutorials out there to get you started. Here's one: http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/index.html http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/index.html But there are many, many others. Some are particularly good for people in certain specialties. For instance, here's an excellent LaTeX resource for logicians: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/logicmatters/l4llogiciansnew.html http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/Smith/logicmatters/...
- apl 16y ago
  Ha. I remember Smith being ridiculously adamant about everybody using LaTeX for their essays and logic stuff...
elehack 16y ago
You can use a wysiwyg-ish editor like LyX or TeXmacs, but eventually, you'll likely want formatting it doesn't make trivial, particularly for something like a resume. If you're comfortable with Vim or Emacs, both of them have good LaTeX support. The AucTeX package for Emacs is particularly excellent (it needs to be installed separately, but Debian packages it). There are also editors best described as "LaTeX IDEs". They provide a syntax-highlighting editor and have particular support for running the LaTeX processing toolchain, parsing error messages and warnings (a nontrivial proposition), and sometimes provide support for generating LaTeX code snippets like table layouts. One such package is Texmaker, a Qt-based IDE with a look-and-feel somewhat like Qt Creator.
tkahn6 16y ago
gedit has a LaTeX plugin which is what I use. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gedit-latex-plugin http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=gedit-latex-plugi...

adulau 16y ago

In the same idea, there are the nice looking resume template from Dario Taraborelli: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex (Typesetting your academic CV in LaTeX). If you want your CV not to be seen in the crowd: the Europass CV LaTeX template http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/europecv.html http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/europ... ....

goalieca 16y ago

I have a latex resume and I run into a few problems. Some companies/agencies only accept .doc formats. The latex2rtf or latex2txt is also error-prone. But, my resume looks awesome and it's easy to move things around/add things without any formatting. I haven't touched formatting in 5 years or so.

rick_2047 16y ago
I used a latex class to format one of my papers. At the final date of submission I found out they except only .doc format. I am still looking desperately for a latex2doc converter. Anyone here knows about this?
- gnosis 16y ago
  You could try asking on #latex on freenode. But, from what I remember, there aren't any. Or at least not any that do a passable job. One sort of hackish thing you could try is simply printing out your resume and scanning it in. Then import the scanned pages as images directly in to the Word document. It will technically be in Word format, and may even look nice when printed (assuming you've scanned your printouts in at a high enough resolution). Though, of course, the text won't be editable.
  - bzbarsky 16y ago
    Under the assumption that the paper in question is being published in a journal, that might be a bad idea. In my experience, journals will typically take your content and then reformat it themselves to fit in whatever their constraints are (page size, number of columns, possibly starting in the middle of a page, etc, etc). For journals that take LaTeX submissions, they will generally just apply their house style file. For journals that take Word submissions, they will generally just apply their house Word style. For journals that accept either one... see above. ;)
- buster 16y ago
  There is latex 2 odt. Might be a starting point.

finemann 16y ago

There is a very nice LaTeX class than can be used to make beautiful resume's: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/ http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/modernc... See sample resume's here: http://www.math.uic.edu/~hurder/math589/vita.html http://www.math.uic.edu/~hurder/math589/vita.html

ztan 16y ago

I use jobspice.com and call it a day.

bluesmoon 16y ago

The last job I applied to, I sent a plain text resume and they were impressed. Since then I've just kept my LinkedIn profile up to date and get a PDF from that to send out (believe it or not, I need to send a resume to HR if I want to change departments within the company).

bsergean 16y ago

The day I converted my latex resume to pure HTML plus some embedded CSS, I was really pleased. At least I understand HTML layout while latex was this magic black box that I didn't understand at all. Plus if you pick a nice font like Georgia it will look a bit like latex. http://jeanserge.com/resume.html http://jeanserge.com/resume.html

ranchev 16y ago

Nice to see that others do it too! The real problem I have seen with resumes in PDF format is that most companies (actually mostly agencies) tend to ask for .doc files. In fact a lot of their online application process requires .doc files. I have a very simple solution - avoid applying there! Often people who tend to write their resumes in LaTeX would find most of these jobs less than acceptable anyways. When exceptions are required I extract a text version of the resume latex2 rtf/txt/html (or combination) tend to work ok. The rtf and text can easily be saved as .doc. Of course thing are never going to be as pretty as the PDF (but then again these job applications are rarely priorities) Here is a sample derived from my resume: http://ranchev.net/latex http://ranchev.net/latex

gnosis 16y ago
"...a lot of their online application process requires .doc files. I have a very simple solution - avoid applying there!" Amen to that. If more people voted with their feet when companies pull this sort of crap, the world would be much better place.
meatmanek 16y ago
Despite asking me for a .doc, Microsoft didn't complain when I sent them a PDF (of my LaTeX-typeset résumé, of course).

Osmose 16y ago

As this is turning into a "What do you use?" thread: I use Publisher. I can precisely position everything on my resume, align it to a grid, etc. And if an employer only accepts doc files, it's trivial to copy-paste the file contents to Word and reposition them correctly.

e-dard 16y ago

Is it weird that I was very surprised that anybody writes anything important in anything other than LaTeX??

neild 16y ago

I use ASCII. Everyone can read it, I can paste it into emails, and I waste no time fiddling around with formatting on a document that will just be scanned for a few keywords and discarded.

retroafroman 16y ago
When I was applying at many of the big engineering firms last year, several of them wanted a copy pasted, text only version of my resume. Maintaining a copy of the resume in good plaintext form is always a bonus. Well worth the slight bother when updating.
- billswift 16y ago
  Another advantage to keeping a plaintext copy is that it can be quickly formatted however an employer may require it.
sixtofour 16y ago
I sent a resume in ascii, resume.txt, to a company's HR dept. They asked me to send them a .doc Word version. I changed the suffix on my file from .txt to .doc, sent them essentially the exact same file. It opened for them in Word because of the suffix, they were happy and I was then interviewed and hired. That still makes me smile, these many years gone by.

liljimmytables 16y ago

As a great fan of latex, I would LOVE to use it to format my CV. But here in Britain there are far too many HR departments and agencies who will look at your pdf and say "I'm sorry, could you send the original Word doc?" Not that recruiters are always the best way to get a job, but it would be silly to write them out of my searches

marcog1 16y ago
I've had that before. I sent them the latex source and they've been able to handle the rest.

starpilot 16y ago

I just use Word. It's easy, I know it already, and it looks nice: http://readlt.com/r.png http://readlt.com/r.png. Template if anyone's interested: http://readlt.com/resume-template.doc http://readlt.com/resume-template.doc

lkozma 16y ago
It looks decent, I agree, but from typographic point of view, it looks lower visual quality than LaTeX-produced text. Look at how the letters seem to be unevenly aligned to the line, and the spacing between them is also not quite right. See for example [something cool] in your screenshot. The first bracket is miles away from the s, the closing bracket is stuck to the l. EDIT: another issue further down: compare Sed and Vestibulum. In the latter the e looks way too far from the initial letter. More careful kerning would push the e a bit under V's wings. I realize it's not the most important thing in the world, but still :) Anyway, I don't claim to be an expert in typography at all, that's why I also use LaTeX for my CV: http://www.lkozma.net/cv_kl.pdf http://www.lkozma.net/cv_kl.pdf
- starpilot 16y ago
  I think that's just funky MS Word font rendering at low zoom settings. Zooming up removes that artifact, and the PDF doesn't display it like that at all. Certainly the actual spacing of the characters is fine, shown in PDF and printed versions.
- iwwr 16y ago
  Two pages?
  - apl 16y ago
    That's not a résumé, it's an (academic) CV. They have a tendency to be long; our faculty head's, for instance, has 39 pages.
- kleiba 16y ago
  No wonder you became a computer scientist -- with that name! ;-)

malbertife 16y ago

I use org-mode in Emacs: it's the fastest and most convenient way of editing a document's structure I've found so far, and I find myself doing that a lot with my resume. Then I export to LaTeX, HTML, or plain text.

reneky 16y ago
How does the org -> latex -> pdf look in the end? Could you post it?
- malbertife 16y ago
  It contains my home address, mobile number and so on, so I'd rather not post it. But it looks like a plain article class LaTeX document, except that I changed the margins and the font (Palatino instead of Times). If you want a more sophisticated layout you can customize the LaTeX-specific options; they'll be ignored when you export to other formats.

chris_j 16y ago

He posted a follow up with a LaTeX resume template here: http://www.toofishes.net/blog/latex-resume-follow-up/ http://www.toofishes.net/blog/latex-resume-follow-up/ I must confess that I don't understand it well but it has inspired me to actually try LaTeX for the first time. (EDIT - fixed dumb typo. Thanks, RiderOfGiraffes)

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Er, s/temple/template/ ??

iuguy 16y ago

If you're ever planning on sending your CV to a recruiter, don't use LaTeX. Recruiters (reputation for being upgraded estate agents and scum of the earth aside) will want to remove any contact details from your CV to ensure that their client doesn't attempt to contact you except through them. This is why they'll push for word document versions. You might think, "Oh, well I'll just find a recruiter that won't do this" but depending on your chosen profession this may be harder than you think. You might think, "Ok, well I'll just create a PDF version without contact details on it" but that's not enough, because some recruiters actually don't put people forward because they sent PDFs, while telling them that they're putting them forward - the reason being that you're at the back of the queue not because of ability but because you're 'difficult' or they're not able to stick the recruiters logo on or easily paste into their template. Now if none of this is an issue for you, feel free to go ahead and submit a latex generated pdf. Sadly, Word is the lingua franca of recruitment. I've had two guys interview with me independently of a recruiter for positions after said recruiter told them they'd put them forward when they didn't - in both cases the used a Latex CV. Finally, formatting is relevant only to a point - if you've got experience in your field then that trumps any formatting. I've hired guys who use comic sans in their CV because they were bloody brilliant, not because they were funny.

chris_j 16y ago
OK, here's a question: why do companies use recruitment consultants? I've never heard a nice word said about them, certainly not in the tech/IT field. Not by people who work for companies hiring, not by jobs applicants. What value do they add, other than going through a big pile of CVs/resumes and turning it into a smaller pile of CVs/resumes (and, by the sounds of things, likely tossing out a whole load of excellent candidates in many cases)?
- iuguy 16y ago
  A recruiter would be better positioned to add value than I. I've dealt with recruiters on an employer and employee basis and it generally varies massively as to what you get. Out of all the recruiters I've known, there's only one that I have a long term relationship and would consider a friend. That's not a positive note for an industry, given that I've led recruitment in about 4 different jobs across two industries. If you imagine a pre-Internet world, recruiters would provide employers value by having a large potential labour pool, searching that pool for 'talent', then (allegedly) doing some sort of screening so that HR gets CVs that are relevant to the post. In the modern age, much of this could be bypassed but some companies (most notably larger companies) have exclusive contracts with large recruiters, meaning that if you want to work there you have to go through a specific recruiter. Madness, I know, and an industry ripe for disruption but full of people that would fight tooth and nail against it (and not just the recruiters but the employers in some cases).

daniel-cussen 16y ago

You can use http://www.scribtex.com http://www.scribtex.com to design latex documents, too.

dscape 16y ago

If anyone is interested been doing this for ages. You can get the template by git clone git://github.com/dscape/NunoJobResume.git

moe 16y ago

LaTeX needs a modern successor. Yes, the output looks \bf{gorgeous}. But the underlying toolchain and language are past their expiration date. By far. Tasks as simple as "let's add an image here" or "let's move this to the left a little" frequently turn into hour-long journeys deep down into the guts of a 30 year old codebase. There is no reason why a modern tool couldn't use the same algorithms to create equally beautiful output. We're not writing raw postscript to talk to our printers anymore either. \end{rant}

justincormack 16y ago
LuaTeX looks promising, embedding Lua as a scripting language over the underlying algorithms.
- chalst 16y ago
  Luatex is the successor implementation to Pdftex, and it works very well: Context Mk.4 is written as a mixture of Tex and Lua, and is a much cleaner code base than Latex2e. Pdftex is currently the standard Tex engine for the two main Tex distributions, Texlive and Miktex.
pdw 16y ago
TeXmacs aims to be such a tool.
- chalst 16y ago
  I have the impression that Texmacs has about as much momentum behind it as Gnu Hurd.
larsberg 16y ago
Past their expiration date? What about having to do the following every time you add/change a references seems outdated? pdflatex paper && bibtex paper && pdflatex paper && pdflatex paper :-) TBH, though, there's just no comparison for producing nicely-formatted research papers. Especially in that eye-straining, dual-column, 9pt ACM conference format.

bgentry 16y ago

Before my most recent job search (~4 mo. ago) I finally invested the time and effort to break free of Word docs and switch to LaTeX. Honestly, I spent about a week relearning the basic syntax (it's been years) and learning how to do much more advanced formatting than I had done before. The effort I put in was worth every single minute. I started with a fairly advanced template and tweaked the hell out of it until I was satisfied with the end result. I now have a resume that is: 1) version controlled in git as text/code (don't underestimate how cool this is) 2) very simple to update or add sections to without worrying about breaking Word's formatting 3) looks stunning, imho 4) got me callbacks from nearly every place I applied to. I feel like the eye-catching resume was a huge part of this You write code all day long.. formatting a document with it just makes so much more sense once you make the initial time investment. If a recruiter or job site can't handle the PDF, I don't want to work with them anyway.

ohkine 16y ago

I don't understand the appeal. Every single LaTeX-based CV looks exactly the same. The same mediocre serif fonts, the same structure, the same basic layout in every way. I guess there is something to be said for the 'classic' way of doing things -- i'm not saying it's bad per se -- but i certainly don't find it novel or particularly 'gorgeous'. As far as the ease of use and the typography functions, i find Pages (from the iWork suite) to be more than adequate. The layout that he did would have taken me only moments to re-create in Pages, and although LaTeX has some advanced typography features that Pages and OS X don't, the latter seems sufficient to me for just about anyone's CV.

trey 16y ago

I just re-did my resume using indeed.com's resume uploader. It gives you a nice clean formatted resume that you can share publicly, export to .pdf, or email. I don't really see a point in using latex, with these new tools available. I think linkedin has a resume upload and maybe branchout does as well if you are more of the social networking type.

billmcneale 16y ago

This guy needs to spend a few more years in this industry, he will realize that as long as your résumé doesn't contain typos, nobody cares what it looks like. Hell, I even review résumés that are text files. The faster I can access it and read the important stuff, the happier I am. I couldn't care less if it's using TeX, LaTeX, Word, PDF or HTML, and I will probably even ding you if you brag because you used LaTeX to write it, because you're using tools that are twenty years old.

billmcneale 16y ago

If his résumé is so good, why isn't it available on his web site? "Contact me by email and let me know a good reason you'd like to see it and I'll be happy to send a copy along to you." Sure, I will try to convince you that I want to see your résumé because your skills look like a good match for a position I'm trying to fill. Except I don't know your skills because... I don't have access to your résumé. Talk about some ego.

pangram 16y ago
He is perhaps trying to avoid aggressive recruiters.