5 ms·

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 runnin

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.

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.