4 ms·

Every few years I say to myself, "This is the way to go. I want my resume to be programmable and data driven." I'm not great at LaTeX now, and I was only ever

by kemiller2002 4y ago

Every few years I say to myself, "This is the way to go. I want my resume to be programmable and data driven." I'm not great at LaTeX now, and I was only ever ok. After getting into it, I've never seen a benefit from it after trying to do it. Learning all the esoteric rules to make LaTeX work only for that, is just too high of a hill to climb for that alone. I want it to be different, but for me, it's not.

anifru 4y ago
I had the same experience using LaTeX. I manage my resume un Google Docs now
pydry 4y ago
I've gone through a similar thing. I like the principles behind latex but it's really rough around the edges (in ways that are baked in and will doubtless never be fixed). The error messages given on invalid markup in particular are atrocious.
luisegr 4y ago
I wanted to have something like that too, but end up building my resume as a JSON file, and generating an HTML template that can be designed with help of css, it's really fast to add things to it or update the style, I'm thinking on publishing it on github once I clean up the code
littlelady 4y ago
In my opinion, LaTeX is useful for typesetting (1) unwieldy documents (2) using as a template for documents you write often and scripting it. (1) By unwieldy I mean a book or academic writing. Typesetting a thesis or a book is "easy" to do with LaTeX, especially if that document contains a lot of acronyms, glossaries, figures, cross-references, bibliography, etc... there are lots of great templates out there for theses and books; creating one from scratch is more often than not, overkill. (2) One use case of what I mean here is document generation, say you have a table of employee names, phone numbers, email addresses. You can easily generate new business cards for all of your employees for the printers by creating a script to do so. Though, the initial investment may only be worth it for a larger amount of data. A resume is mostly about design and is not altered with the frequency that would make typesetting in LaTeX interesting for anything other than curiosity. Also, moderncv produces enormous files. I agree that LaTeX is not suited to every task.

anifru 4y ago

I had the same experience using LaTeX. I manage my resume un Google Docs now

pydry 4y ago

I've gone through a similar thing. I like the principles behind latex but it's really rough around the edges (in ways that are baked in and will doubtless never be fixed). The error messages given on invalid markup in particular are atrocious.

luisegr 4y ago

I wanted to have something like that too, but end up building my resume as a JSON file, and generating an HTML template that can be designed with help of css, it's really fast to add things to it or update the style, I'm thinking on publishing it on github once I clean up the code

littlelady 4y ago

In my opinion, LaTeX is useful for typesetting (1) unwieldy documents (2) using as a template for documents you write often and scripting it. (1) By unwieldy I mean a book or academic writing. Typesetting a thesis or a book is "easy" to do with LaTeX, especially if that document contains a lot of acronyms, glossaries, figures, cross-references, bibliography, etc... there are lots of great templates out there for theses and books; creating one from scratch is more often than not, overkill. (2) One use case of what I mean here is document generation, say you have a table of employee names, phone numbers, email addresses. You can easily generate new business cards for all of your employees for the printers by creating a script to do so. Though, the initial investment may only be worth it for a larger amount of data. A resume is mostly about design and is not altered with the frequency that would make typesetting in LaTeX interesting for anything other than curiosity. Also, moderncv produces enormous files. I agree that LaTeX is not suited to every task.