

Show HN: my "My Latex resume" project - cies
https://github.com/cies/resume

======
njs12345
Dario Taraborelli's 'Typesetting your academic CV in LaTeX' is also a good
resource (works just fine for a normal CV as well):
<http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex>

~~~
cies
This is one of the tools I evaluated, before I decided to make my own. Look at
the differences:

<http://nitens.org/cv/cv.pdf>

[https://github.com/cies/resume/blob/master/cies-breijs-
resum...](https://github.com/cies/resume/blob/master/cies-breijs-
resume.pdf?raw=true)

I think CVtex uses far too much whitespace, in his case yielding a whopping
7-page resume.

But luckily tastes differ :)

~~~
stfu
Would love to see more variations on that. My own CV looks very similar to the
CVtex version but the length becomes quite a problem - on the other hand I
find the githup version too much squeezed down and "wordy". Any other
alternatives?

~~~
cies
> I find the githup version too much squeezed down and "wordy"

It's up to the author how much words here uses. I use the summary on top,
which totally optional.. Looking that the coe you can see that everything is
simply Latex, therefor easy to modify.

The level-squeezedness is part of this design, if you don't like that then I
guess it's better to look further.

Maybe it easy to squeeze the CVtex template a little.

------
dlsym
Latex: The fetish thing.

LaTeX: The typesetting / document preparation system and markup language.
Pronounced: /ˈlɑːtɛk/

Just to throw in some facts :-)

~~~
sad_panda
Yeah, I feel like I've tainted my work computer's browser history. :)

------
Corrado
While I appreciate the work you've done, it looks to me like you could have
saved quite a bit of time and if you had created your resume in HTML+CSS. In
fact, it looks quite a bit like HTML5 already with proper sections and such.

My understanding of LaTeX (which is surely lacking) is that one creates the
content and the engine turns that into a document. However, it looks as though
you not only created the content but also extensive rules on how to display
it. This feels much more like HTML+CSS-like than a LaTeX script.

Can someone help me understand why this particular example of LaTeX is a good
thing? Am I wrong in my analysis?

~~~
gnok
HTML+CSS would provide a fantastic way to view a resume on a web page.
However, a resume is more usually forwarded around multiple times via email
and then finally printed for a review.

HTML+CSS offers little to no control of how a page would look like once its
printed. LaTeX on the other hand, can be optimized with printable fonts,
appropriate margins and such like. A PDF with embedded fonts would guarantee
that the page would look the same, printed with any computer/OS/printer
combination.

~~~
buu700
What makes you say that? Mine is HTML/CSS -- <http://buu700.com/cv.pdf> \--
and it seems to be pretty consistent. If anything, I would argue that the
fine-grained formatting control you can get with HTML/CSS is basically
unsurpassed, especially with rendering tools like wkhtmltopdf available.

~~~
dfc
_"I would argue that the fine-grained formatting control you can get with
HTML/CSS is basically unsurpassed, especially with rendering tools like
wkhtmltopdf available."_

Best April Fools Day joke ever...

~~~
buu700
Okay, I'll bite. What can you _not_ easily do (which one would reasonably do
in a resume/CV) in terms of formatting, layout, typography, and so on using
HTML/CSS(/Bootstrap?)/wkhtmltopdf?

~~~
dfc
The joke is less funny when you change the punchline and restrict it to
resumes only but its still pretty funny.

Typography? Seriously? In the context of a resume I would gloss over
typography but you mentioned it explicitly. Html/css does not play on the same
level as text when it comes to kerning, ligatures, letter spacing,
expansion/protrusion, etc. Can you do any of the things microtype does with
CSS? Searching the issues of wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts.
All of these are no brainers with latex. Wkhtmlpdf does not like negative
letter spacing! That's something that my mom does with ms word to squeeze a
little more text somewhere without a new line or margin change / page break.
How does css/html handle the period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence?
Multilingual resumes with different spacing requirements for different
languages? Ie what is html/css method for \frenchspacing? Does html/css
provide language aware layout decisions like babel/pollyglossia? Line breaking
and hyphenation are notoriously horrible with html/css.

Can you easily reference your bibtex CV and include a list of your
publications in html/css? A list of publications is a must for
academic/research jobs. Can you easily change the reference format if you
decide to pivot to a new industry that expects a different style than your
previous industry?

Easily compute lengths of strings on the fly to use a consistent indent? Ie so
that your city column consistently shows up in the same place after you
include a new job with a date string that is longer than previous jobs. One of
the default cv packages on CTAN can draw lines of different lengths depending
on how long you were in a position. How do you do date calculations in
html/css? Can you then take the length of date and do calculations relative to
the margin/font/line hight? (I think its moderncv) I don't need any units in
my resume but I bet a lot of fields have a need to use units in accomplishment
descriptions in their resumes. What is the html/css equivalent of siunits?

How does html/css handle page breaks? What is the css/html equivalent of
widow/orphan control? When a resume with a list of long publications goes many
pages how does wkhtmlpdf update headers/footers that reference page numbers
and section titles? Can it use a different header footer on pages 2+?

More generally would you recommend printing a book with html/css? And if not
what publishing/document layout features do you think are relevant to a book
but not resumes? If you are such a fan of wkhtmlpdf why did you use itext for
your resume?

~~~
buu700
_> kerning ... letter spacing_

<http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_letter-spacing.asp>

\---

 _> ligatures_

@font-face supports this.

\---

 _> expansion/protrusion_

[http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_hanging-
punctuation....](http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_hanging-
punctuation.asp)

(Simple workaround for browsers without support:
<http://csshowto.com/typography/hanging-punctuation-with-css/>)

\---

 _> Searching the issues of wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts._

I don't know what you're referring to specifically, but I've never had a
problem.

\---

 _> Wkhtmlpdf does not like negative letter spacing!_

Works perfectly for me, but as always when using a rendering tool like
wkhtmltopdf you need to be careful and precise with your page size and DPI
settings if you want predictable results.

\---

 _> How does css/html handle the period after Dr. versus the end of a
sentence?_

Probably the same by default, unless you specify an alternate behaviour.

\---

 _> Ie what is html/css method for \frenchspacing?_

<http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_word-spacing.asp>

\---

 _> Does html/css provide language aware layout decisions like
babel/pollyglossia?_

<http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_lang.asp>

\---

 _> Line breaking and hyphenation are notoriously horrible with html/css._

[Citation needed]

If CSS hyphenation in a particular browser doesn't work well, you can always
try a JS library like this one: <http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/>
(wkhtmltopdf supports JavaScript execution).

\---

 _> Can you easily reference your bibtex CV and include a list of your
publications in html/css?_

What kind of question is that? Can you easily reference your HTML CV in Latex?
Anyway, yes you can, evidently: <http://code.google.com/p/bibtex-js/>

\---

 _> Ie so that your city column consistently shows up in the same place after
you include a new job with a date string that is longer than previous jobs._

<http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_float.asp> is pretty standard, if that's
what you're talking about. I'm not 100% clear what you're asking about (I'd
need to see an example), but it sounds like you're looking for either float or
tables.

\---

 _> How do you do date calculations in html/css?_

I'm sure some hack exists for this somewhere, but generally if you want
imperative computation you'd be best served by including a JavaScript library
(which, as mentioned, wkhtmltopdf will support flawlessly).

\---

 _> What is the html/css equivalent of siunits?_

Obviously it would be silly to claim pure HTML/CSS as a holy grail of math-
related symbol rendering, but if you find yourself in the position of needing
this capability in an HTML/CSS document, try this: <http://www.mathjax.org/>

\---

 _> How does html/css handle page breaks?_

<http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_print_pageba.asp>

\---

 _> What is the css/html equivalent of widow/orphan control?_

<http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/page.html#break-inside>

\---

 _> When a resume with a list of long publications goes many pages how does
wkhtmlpdf update headers/footers that reference page numbers and section
titles?_

<http://stackoverflow.com/a/7174900/459881>

\---

 _> Can it use a different header footer on pages 2+?_

Should be fairly trivial to add on the to the previous solution.

\---

 _> More generally would you recommend printing a book with html/css?_

Sure, why not? I'd personally prefer something like Markdown from a syntactic
perspective (which renders to HTML/CSS), given the large amount of text to be
written, but from a formatting perspective it would be perfectly fine.

\---

 _> If you are such a fan of wkhtmlpdf why did you use itext for your resume?_

I didn't? I'd never heard of iText before, but my build script does run the
output of wkhtmltopdf through pdftk to add metadata; it's possible that iText
is a dependency of pdftk. If you want the source I have it up here:
<http://buu700.com/cv.html>

~~~
dfc
It is cute that you pasted a lot of reference links mentioning css support. It
would have been somewhat more effective if there were actual working examples
occasionally. You certainly did not demonstrate that any of it would be
easy...

 _kerning ... letter spacing_ \-- It works "best" when pixels are used as the
unit? Joke. Do you know the right amount of pixels for different line
heights/font sizes? Calculating it every time is an easy implementation?

 _ligatures_ \-- I could not find any good real world examples of @font-face,
and none with examples of not inserting ligatures into words that should not
have characters replaced by ligatures.

 _expansion/protrusion_ \-- According to your reference NO MAJOR BROWSERS
support it and the _simple workaround_ is a kludge and does not work inside of
flowed text. Joke.

 _wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts_ \-- You don’t know what I am
referring to? I am referring to the 50+ issues for wkhtmlpdf on their project.
That is complicated?

 _negative letter spacing_ \-- Letter spacing does not require a lot of effort
with latex.

 _period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence_ \-- You think manually
specifying the behavior is easy?

 _frenchspacing_ \-- You realize that your link has nothing to do with
frenchspacing right?

 _babel/pollyglossia_ \-- Yet again your link has nothing to do with the
aforementioned packages.

 _Line breaking_ \-- Do you really need a citation for html/css's awful line
breaking behavior? Maybe this discussion is a bit out of your wheelhouse? To
get html/css quality line breaks in latex you have to turn \sloppy on.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974963> or
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070203140340/http://www.nat.vu....](http://web.archive.org/web/20070203140340/http://www.nat.vu.nl/~sneep/ars/type/)

 _bibtex_ \-- What kind of question is the "ability to build a list of
publications with bibtex in a resume/cv?" Vitally important for any academic
field. (FYI by referencing I meant point your resume at a .bib file and having
them seamlessly included) Have you tested this or do you have any examples of
it playing nicely with all of the other hacks/kludges/might-work solutions you
posted? What about changing the formats to a different industry standard? You
think creating your own template to handle all the many corner cases is an
easy solution compared to bibtex?

 _siunits_ \-- Mathjax has nothing to do with siunits. Seriously this was
almost as bad as your babel/pollyglossia solution.

 _page breaks?_ \-- Awesome you found some css documents that mention page
breaks and orphan control. Did you notice how widely supported this is? And
how about these caveats:

"You cannot use this property on absolutely positioned elements.

Use the page-breaking properties as few times as possible and avoid page-
breaking properties inside tables, floating elements, and block elements with
borders."

 _headers/footers_ \-- Should be? Lets try and discuss the things you know
about and have a little experience with?

 _book quality publication_ \-- I should have read this first. It seems that
you do not really understand the requirements of publication quality
documents. FYI, when you publish something most of the emphasis is on your
consumer/audience. So while its wonderful that your prefer writing in markdown
I am not sure why the consumer is going to care about your "syntactic
perspective." Take a look at the highest voted answers for beautifully
published documents:

<http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/1319/7490>

Or better yet try take a look at a tufte book and tell me that an html
implementation would be perfectly fine.

 _wkthtmlpdf_ \-- Its in the creator/producer field of your resume. You do
understand your toolset right? You needed an additional tool to add metadata
to your resume? You cant just add it easily by hand at the top of your
document? Joke.

------
laxatives
I used Matthew Boedicker/Derek Hildreth's template. Would love to hear your
constructive criticism.

[https://docs.google.com/open?id=1zoOILbnhyZ0YnnI8Ur9ufEZbEin...](https://docs.google.com/open?id=1zoOILbnhyZ0YnnI8Ur9ufEZbEinL4iHd6_Gy-
WWoqUpRTKwLqi34VITsxUfc)

~~~
cies
Looks nice. +1 for only one page :)

2 things:

* the bullets, are they necessary? * same for the grey backgrounds * it seems not to be lining up on the right.. intentional?

------
makecheck
Have you looked at docutils?

A few years ago I rewrote my résumé in reStructuredText where you can use
rst2html.py, rst2latex.py, etc. to generate various formats from one text
source. And the source file is so free of obvious markup that it serves as a
"plain text" version.

~~~
cies
Never looked at it.. Do you have a link to your resume so I can see the end
result?

For me all that matters was to make it look 'damn' good on paper, as resumes
are usually consumed from paper. I knowingly compromised on a more web-
integrated version.

(Or in other words: I think a PDF with clickable links is web-integrated
enough)

~~~
makecheck
The HTML/CSS that's generated by Docutils is very basic; you'd want to
customize it (which is fairly straightforward) to have a more interesting
layout or custom fonts, etc.

An example of RST-generated HTML is Docutils' own documentation:
<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/README.html>

Original source markup (also a suitable plain-text version):
<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/README.txt>

Unfortunately I don't see a good example of PDF output online, but it
basically generates LaTeX and PDF from that.

The nice thing is having the flexibility to produce all these formats with one
edit.

------
dan2k3k4
I also have my resume in LaTeX on GitHub :)

<https://github.com/dan2k3k4/CV-Resume-in-LaTeX>

Though looking through yours, I'll need to take some time and clean up my code
:)

------
ahcox
I like the CurVe latex class. It works for me:
<http://www.hoogli.com/Andrew_Cox_cv.pdf>

It is worth going to the author's page about CurVe rather than relying on the
ctan package. He has some nice customisations such as the thick horizontal
rule that I borrowed, and gives his own CV as an example:
<http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/software/latex.php#curve>

Here is the archive: <http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/curve>

~~~
cies
Not a fan of CurVe, had a look at it but decided to roll my own. :)

------
dhawalhs
A while back I had set out to solve the "multiple resume problem" where you
generate resumes in different format(html,pdf,plain text etc.) from a single
source. This way all your resumes are consistent. I haven't solved it
completely yet but you can find the github repository of "modern resume" over
at <https://github.com/dhawalhshah/modern-resume>. I am using it at
<http://www.dhawal.me/>

~~~
sandipagr
The dates you attended Mumbai University are in reverse. Just so you know.

~~~
stfu
Plus using Opera and having a relatively small browser window makes
"Entrepreneurial Activities" overlay with parts of "MoVue (Android App)".

------
beck5
Here is a copy of it on sharelatex.com -
<https://www.sharelatex.com/project/4f78ebb84bae4a991a00015e>

~~~
cies
nice service!

------
bleusink
I'm personally a fan of the moderncv package: <http://ctan.org/pkg/moderncv>

It uses lots of whitespace, which I believe adds to the readability.

Some examples can be found here:
[http://archive.cs.uu.nl/mirror/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/mod...](http://archive.cs.uu.nl/mirror/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/examples/)

------
chucklarge
Some self promoting here, but this is my html resume project based on Jason
Blevins' CV Latex template. I am using Prince, but printing from the browser
gives a nice result too. <https://github.com/chucklarge/html-resume-template>

------
jiggy2011
This is all very nice, but a surprisingly large number of recruitment agencies
still demand CVs in word format.

~~~
ahcox
I was at an interview recently and was disgusted to see my CV in the hands of
the interviewers with the formatting totally messed up and the logo of the
recruiters all over it. They had obviously cut and pasted into a word document
even though I wouldn't give them this originally.

~~~
ahcox
Perhaps a PDF with an embedded image per page is the way forward.

~~~
jiggy2011
Problem with doing that is recruiters are lazy and you are giving them an
extra step to go through. They probably like to just have a folder full of
.docs for each posting.

A few times I've sent applications in PDF format just to be auto rejected.

------
delinka
The date being what it is, I was expecting a résumé printed on Latex 'paper'
... or something.

~~~
cies
lol. maybe I should have postponed posting it till tmrw :)

------
davidmr
It looks very nice, but I'm genuinely curious as to why someone would go to
the trouble of TeXing up a document and choose to use anything other than the
standard Computer Modern font. Is it purely a matter of taste?

~~~
cies
Yuk, that font look horrendous...

> Is it purely a matter of taste?

I'd like to believe otherwise, but you are probably right. :)

It's pretty easy to change fonts, I include one example for Linux Libertine in
the code.

~~~
pbsd
I don't understand what it is about Palatino that people find attractive; it
looks ugly as shit to me. I've cycled through most of the fonts available in
LaTeX (and beyond, with XeTeX), and always end up reverting back to lmodern.

I guess it is a matter of taste.

------
cies
Comments -- on both the Latex code and the content of my resume -- are very
welcome!

~~~
rmk2
What about the use of microtypography?

I think that you'd get optically cleaner margins (on the right) by using the
microtype package. \usepackage{microtype} _just works_ , though you could feed
it \usepackage[expansion,protrusion]{microtype}. Since you have the \ifxetex
switch and since XeTeX doesn't support expansion yet, you'd have to throw a
\usepackage[protrusion]{microtype} in there, given that you have the XeTeX-
microtype-package installed.

~~~
cies
wow.. never heard of the microtype package.

look very nice, will be playing with this for sure.

thanks!

~~~
rmk2
One of the most impressive things about the package really is that it "just
works". And especially protrusion is wonderful in my opinion, since it really
makes nicer margins.

Glad you like it!

------
p_sherman
Looks good. Way too much text though, and too many buzzwords.

------
home010
Looks amazing! I'm forking it right now :)

~~~
cies
Cheers.

------
honkey5
Do you have a link to the PDF?

~~~
cies
It's right on top of the GitHub README.md, anyway for your convenience:

<https://github.com/cies/resume>

~~~
honkey5
Oops sorry, must have overlooked it...

Looks awesome! Well done.

~~~
cies
np. thanks!

