

Free online resume creator based on LaTeX - cvsintellect
https://www.cvsintellect.com

======
ygra
This breaks with non-ASCII characters. Hard. The ö in my name becomes "ouml;"
– some HTML encoding mangling is present there somewhere which really
shouldn't be happening in 2013. There isn't even a reason to even use those
entities in HTML. The ß in my street name manages to remove the rest of the
street name completely from the output. I'd suggest you should test that data
entered on the web site goes through unmangled to LaTeX and then use XeLaTeX
to stay clear of Unicode problems (and also for better font support).

Fun facts:

    
    
      - ö gets mangled, ö (o and U+0308) results in "o?"
      - ü doesn't get mangled and survives in the PDF for some reason
      - When you return to the page all of ö, ü and ß are replaced by their HTML entities
    

Date formats could use at least ISO 8601 as well.

You can enter math mode and do fun stuff, but with people not knowing that
it's LaTeX underneath this probably just invites fun errors when people use $
to mean $.

I've written my CV in LaTeX 1½ years ago (mostly because I didn't have a good-
looking template in Word and was too lazy to build one myself) and I remember
that I had to fight hard against moderncv to get it to do the things I wanted.
It's not exactly flexible.

~~~
cvsintellect
Thanks a lot for spending your time listing everything here. means a lot!
sorry for the non-ascii bit. we will fix it as soon as possible.

~~~
ygra
If you need further help with finding such issues, I have at least a little
experience in testing encoding/charset/Unicode stuff as well as i18n issues.

~~~
cvsintellect
That is extremely kind of you! we will try to resolve the issues and get back
to you if we need some help there. thanks again!

------
cvsintellect
We got a lot of feedback through our feedback form which sadly is anonymous.
Though a lot of them were positive there was one particularly negative
feedback. We thought it touched on a lot of important topics and we should
respond to it. Since most of the traffic today has been from ycombinator we
are putting it here hoping for the person to read. sentences starting with -
is feedback recieved while >> is our response.

\- Felt compelled to fill in "Personal" section, even though specifying
Gender, DOB, Nationality is very unprofessional. Only because it is a section
that cannot be removed, and became a Giant Bold "PERSONAL" at the bottom of my
resume that was empty -- so if I can't remove it, I guess I better have
-something- there ! >> agreed. have listed it as a bug to be fixed in next
release! sorry for that.

\- so then I fill in some hobbies, at least, and it won't wrap along the
margins correctly, as though I shouldn't have so many interesting hobbies for
these templates? Looks very bad when everything else does wrap, makes it look
shoe-horned. >> agreed. the list of hobbies & languages are supposed to be
small. if you need a full fledged hobbies / languages space you can create a
custom section for it & list everything there :) as for wrapping. we will try
to fix it.

\- holding multiple positions and titles in a single company, as many as 4 in
3 years, and 3 in 3 years for the next job, I prefer to list them in
descending chronological order under the same section, describing the various
'accomplishments' underneath as opposed to describing 4 different "jobs". \- i
had to forgoe this information, and instead list all 3 or 4 titles as a single
sentance, comma-seperated, which word wraps with a hyphen and looks confusing.
I guess I would have to pick my "favorite" title, and stick with it. >>
agreed. will brainstorm on how we can fix this. how would you do this in
linked-in? it would be another position right? we are asking this as we are
trying to keep 1:1 compatibility with linkedin since that data will need to be
copied in the same format here.

\- No place, really, to list the "business unit" or "department" under which
those titles were held. Both the titles and the department are far more
telling about the employment history than any bulletpoint can say. \- I would
also have to add a comma, and a business unit/department, after "Company", if
I wanted this information present. I do, it is very vital information,
especially in a large corporation like $#!^, where discovering which dept. to
contact for verifying employment would be impossible otherwise. >> agreed. we
missed location of office & department in positions. will add them soon.

\- A number of times 'preview' did not reflect what I had recently saved. I
did notice the baloon tip to save the first time I changed templates. I'm very
sure I saved it vigorously before preview. Feels like I'm hitting a server
farm that isn't replicating quickly enough. >> we are on Google App Engine
(GAE) with 3 idle instances & with auto scaling feature of GAE (best in class)
this should not have been the case. But we went totally viral today! We will
see what we can do about this.

\- preferred page breaks on sections are needed, I don't like seeing a single
bullet point on the top of page 2 describing something I did at a job on the
bottom of page 1. I might be tempted to simply remove an accomplishment to
make it break where I'd like! Only to decide against it, or other padding
methods, because I decide on a different template or add or remove another
line above it. >> agreed. we are brainstorming on pagebreaks & greater control
on footers.

\- Here I've avoided the privacy invasion of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and
all of these other data mining whores, but just to provide you feedback I'm
suddenly pushing data through Google anyway. Makes me consider where my data
is actually stored -- an AWS cluster, a google app engine database? Now I'm
going to have to go back, re-login, and anonymize my data I've provided you.
sigh. >> we chose to store data on GAE since it provides the best security
that can be provided. Its certainly much more than what a 2 member dev team
can provide. as for the data, we promise not to share that data with anyone
without your consent. is there anything more we can do in this regard?

\- after completing the anonymizing of my information, as account deletion is
not possible and it became evident that you do not store my data on servers
that you own, and I cannot trust your third party cloud providers, esp. after
reading your privacy policy, whoever mysteriously they may be. For this reason
I would never store my resume with your service. You must assure me that your
servers are physical equipment that you own, in a facility that is owned and
operated by a legitimate business with an address and phone number that a
human is known to answer now and then, not some lowest-cost cloud provider. >>
we are on cloud. (GAE & AWS to be more specific) and we are there not because
they are cheap. they do cost quiet some money! we chose them because we think
they actually can provide much more security, reliability & performance that a
small dev team can with an owned instance of sever & database. we would surely
think of having our own server, database etc. when we actually can afford
them.

\- Nobody likes seeing &amp; in their resume when editing. It looks like it
decodes correctly in preview, but why should we have to be confused by it in
editing? As software engineer, I feel compelled to correct it each time -- it
frightens me that it could become doubly-escaped, becoming &amp;&amp; later
when I'm not looking, when the & in &amp; gets re-encoded again sometime
later, and make me look like a real idiot to a prospective employer. >>
agreed. will add that as a bug to be fixed in next release.

\- I would not pay for your service: #1: Privacy and #2 Templating issues
(described in previous feedback) -- my own resume made in MS Word simply looks
much better. >> have a look at some samples made on our site:
[http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf) and if you prove us your similar looking template on word
doc is better after print we will shutdown the service. period.

\- I would recommend your service to others: who don't really care about who
has their address, phone number, date of birth stored on some-random-harddisk,
and have a very difficult time in MS Word. When I worked as a tutor in a
college, I assisted at least 100 students with their resumes each quarter --
you would want to consider advertising in such spaces, though many would be
inaccessible by you by their tax-funded nature: Workplace placement programs
and libraries, for instance. >> yes students are our first goto market since
they would be our early adopters. we are thinking on how we can reach them.

\- I would actually pay for your service if you did anything more useful than
templating (and the formatting and limitations previously mentioned were
resolved). For instance: providing shorthand.com/firstname-lastname URL's for
a web version, exporting to .doc, and finishing out the many unfinished
concepts already here. >> yes. we know you would not pay for the currently
running software online. and thats why its free :) we have premium templates &
public resumes in our roadmap. but we are still thinking on a path to choose.

\- Your pintrist referral link at the bottom just makes you look like a cheap,
cheap, attention-seeking whore. >> yes. sadly we are in attention seeking mode
right now & we would not make any balls about it. we have worked on this for a
year now & we think it can serve the people for good. we want it to reach as
many eyeballs as possible and get as many feedbacks as possible.

Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Hope this reply makes you feel much
better about the whole thing :)

~~~
cvsintellect
personal is no more a mandatory section.

------
mcv
Looks good. My old CV originates at Linkedin labs, which had some nice
templates a few years ago. Using LaTeX is a particularly nice touch, because
now I can tell recruiters that I really don't have a Word version of my CV.

~~~
cvsintellect
Yes :) Its a step towards changing the way CVs / Resumes are made!

------
hrjet
Coincidentally I was experimenting with LaTeX for writing my resume today, so
this caught my eye.

In the screenshots, I see the same problem that I was facing with an [offline
tool][1]:

There are too many hyphens all over the place! For example in this screenshot:
[https://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic...](https://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic.png)

... you can see "Devel-oped" "function-ality" "con-version" "expo-sure"
"communi-cations"

Most other word processors can justify text without too much hyphenation. The
TeX system seems to work differently (at least by default).

[1] [https://github.com/mwhite/resume](https://github.com/mwhite/resume)

~~~
cvsintellect
Yes. We see your point. Will see if there is an alternative for that. Not sure
wether we want to do away with hyphens. They look pretty good.
[http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic.pdf) we will get back to you on this. thanks.

------
alexmunroe
It looks potentially a very good application, however, I'm unable to sign up
as I use a personalised domain and get this message:

Incorrect domain of Email-id! (only gmail, yahoo, msn, outlook, rediff,
hotmail are supported for now).

Do you have plans to support a greater number of domains soon?

~~~
cvsintellect
yes. this is basically to stop people from signing up from mailinator kind of
email ids. For now you can either use a gmail, yahoo, msn, rediff, hotmail or
even do OAuth signin from facebook & linkedin. You can even try without sign-
up :)

~~~
lawn
I feel a bit insulted that I can't sign up with my own domain. That's a bad
move.

~~~
LocalPCGuy
This. I use my own domain for all of my email, and don't like to give out my
gmail email address. This is a really bad idea, and should be one of your top
priorities to be changed. Getting "bad" emails is part of the cost of doing
business, so stop hiding behind the "it costs us money to send emails" line.
So what?! You are eliminating users by doing this, which in the long run costs
you WAY more than sending to some non-existent emails. Just validate the email
addresses so you know they exist, and maybe re-check in 30 days - that would
probably eliminate most of the "testing" emails from your system.

~~~
cvsintellect
yes. we realize that we might loose some users just for the sake of not having
an email acc wit a popular provider. for some reason we assumed that users
would have an acc with one of them and use it or try without signup..we dint
think of the users who would want to signup but with an alternate email of
theirs. back to drawing rooms on this! :)

------
Ecio78
I wrote my post University CV in LaTeX using TeXnicCenter/MikTeK because I
have used LaTeX for my thesis and I liked the output compared to Word. Then
recently I had to rewrite it completely in English and since I had no LaTeX
system installed on my computer I tried to used the Europass CV
[http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum-
vi...](http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum-vitae) It is
a nice system because you can edit it online, it saves information in your
browser so you can continue editing it and you can even reupload the PDF and
repopulate the fields (it seems to have additional XML data inside).
Unfortunately I resisted just a month using it (I didn't like the
spacing/format) and then decided to completely rewrite the CV (this time using
Libre Office).

This is interesting, and maybe I'll give it a try, but how are you planning to
monetize it?

~~~
cvsintellect
Thank you for giving it a try :) For the monetizing bit. Frankly we have no
idea! we wanted people to LaTeX and make amazing resumes. We are thinking hard
on how to keep this going. Premium templates, Paid publicly hosted resumes are
some of the ideas we have. Not sure what way we will be treading.

------
beck5
Interesting concept. There are a lot of cv builders on the market, building
some high quality premium cv's could be a viable business but getting noticed
is quite hard so pushing the LaTeX angle on the site might be a good way to
find a niche.

(disclaimer I am the cofounder of sharelatex.com)

~~~
cvsintellect
Thanks a lot for the feedback :) we have been thinking on how to push it. Its
time saving, quality is amazing. We want to leverage LaTeX usage but people
outside academia are not very aware of it. But we will rethink about it!

~~~
kfk
What about markdown? As long as the service is new, I would be scared of
having my CV depended on your app. Yes, I know LaTeX, I also know it's a pain
to set up if you are applying "non standard" formatting.

By the way, I don't know where are you from, but this tool looks cool enough
for Nordic countries. In particular, you could target easily carrier centers
in Danish universities ([http://bss.au.dk/knowledge-exchange/career-
centre/](http://bss.au.dk/knowledge-exchange/career-centre/)). These centers
offer free advice for students' CV. I see this service being advised or even
used there (like the students upload his CV on the system and gets help
virtually).

~~~
StevenXC
My CV is based off of this project:

[http://mwhite.github.io/resume/](http://mwhite.github.io/resume/)

I write it in Markdown, and then build it into both a PDF and HTML. Then I use
Github Pages to publish both with a simple push.

~~~
cvsintellect
We preffered LaTeX because of its stunning results. You should look at sample
resume we created [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf)

~~~
StevenXC
This project converts Markdown to LaTeX to PDF.

~~~
cvsintellect
oops sorry for the premature reply. too much hap in a day :( a wysiwyg / rte
is something we worked hard towards since that was the most easiest way to
fill in data. we will have a closer look at it and get back.

------
spindritf
That's one good looking website. And you can skip all registrations, go
straight for the meat, which is also great. Are those templates all your own
design?

Unfortunately, the preview doesn't work for me. Do you have some problems or
is it a matter of only half-filling the form?

BTW What's "Pincode" in the contacts section? Zip/postal code?

EDIT: No, got it. You need to click save on each section. Unfortunately it
doesn't handle non-ascii characters.

~~~
cvsintellect
Yes. Clicking on the save is not very evident. While once you know that you
need to click on save that info is redundant and hence we have kept it hidden
when you are not on the form. We are thinking of ways of making it more
evident the first time. For the non-ascii bit. We are in beta (just a month
being public). We are working on making it perfect! :)

------
cvsintellect
Here is the summary: 1\. handle non-ascii characters 2\. check if we can do
something about hyphens 3\. try and make tex script downloadable 4\. make
click of save after data entry evident the first time 5\. personal should not
be a mandatory section 6\. make delete of objective intuitive 7\. fix date
format display on UI 8\. add latex packages in credits page (sorry missed that
:-/) Please feel free to add if we missed something... Keep em comin! :)

~~~
cvsintellect
7 & 8 is fixed and is online.

------
pagade
'Date Display Type' under 'Settings' should have consistent sample date:

10/2/2013 [Numeric]

10/Dec/2013 [Short Month]

10/December/2013 [Long Month]

Probably there's a typo in first sample. Also DD > 12 helps unambiguously
identify DD from MM.

~~~
shervinafshar
Additionally, the second and third "date display type" are not common at all
(to the point that they seem made-up). For common date formats check CLDR
data: [http://st.unicode.org/cldr-
apps/v#/en/Gregorian/562f98c4c6b2...](http://st.unicode.org/cldr-
apps/v#/en/Gregorian/562f98c4c6b2e321)

Obviously, date formats are different for each locale; en-US: MM/DD/YYYY, en-
GB: DD/MM/YYYY, de-DE: DD.MM.YYYY.

~~~
cvsintellect
yes. we realize that. currently you can configure it to DD/MM/YYYY,
DD/MMM/YYYY, DD/<full month>/YYYY & choose to compute durations between dates.
we will give more configurations soon. thank you for your time.

------
616c
Why would I not use this in place of ShareLatex?

[https://www.sharelatex.com/user/subscription/plans](https://www.sharelatex.com/user/subscription/plans)

I know this is focused on a specific domain, but you have serious competition
with these dudes.

~~~
cvsintellect
1) We are in a specific domain and understand the problems better 2) You dont
need to know LaTeX to use our site. 3) LaTeX is code you will need to maintain
it while here its just data that needs to be updated. 4) Changing template in
LaTeX can be hard, its a re-write, here it would be 2-3 clicks 5) we will
introduce custom templates which you will not find anywhere :)

------
romgain
Very similar to this one: [http://cvmadeeasy.com](http://cvmadeeasy.com) Pro:
no need to register, you can re-upload your CV later on to modify it. Con:
there is only one template, for the moment.

And the design is inspired from moderncv, a great LaTeX package :)

~~~
cvsintellect
nice indeed :) all the best! when you say inspired its not LaTeX underneath?

~~~
romgain
Thanks :)

At first it was using LaTeX to produce the PDF, but now it is just HTML/CSS
templating, and the pdf rendering is done using wkhtmltopdf.

Actually, handling special characters was one of the reasons to switch to
HTML.

~~~
cvsintellect
oh ok. We will try to stick with LaTeX :)

------
nathell
Something's wrong with the fonts. Anything I bash out using the "Classic"
template comes out typeset in Computer Modern, rather than Century Gothic as
outlined in the example.

Any chance to make an option to download the LaTeX code for manual tailoring?

~~~
cvsintellect
Just dropin a mail (through contact us) requesting for the Tex script. We will
be happy to provide it :)

------
lelf
_Have a look at some of our awesome templates_

…which use hyphen in date ranges

~~~
ygra
I guess not even LaTeX users can be expected to have any form of typographical
training. After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything
automagically far better than you could do on your own ;-)

~~~
johnchristopher
_After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything automagically
far better than you could do on your own ;-)_

I got bit by propaganda too last year.

I am a little nervous at the moment because I am picking up latex again in
some weeks after months of not using it and I wonder what has changed and what
I have forgotten since then.

~~~
cvsintellect
Go for it! You would not repent it for sure :)

------
denzil_correa
How different is this from the existing options like Resumonk? [0]

[0]
[http://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates](http://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates)

~~~
cvsintellect
We haven't come across anyone who uses LaTeX for creating your resume and is
free. And why is LaTeX so special? Here are a few reasons:
[http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex) and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX)

~~~
denzil_correa
I know the significance of LaTex as I use it regularly for my work. I am not
sure what something Resumonk uses - doesn't look like LaTex. Great, so LaTex
seems to be the niché.

Have you seen templates hosted at "LaTex Templates"? [0] I would be curious to
know if you're using them or plan to use them in the future.

[0] [http://www.latextemplates.com/](http://www.latextemplates.com/)

~~~
cvsintellect
Yes they usually use HTML and then convert it to PDF. This leads to a lot of
problems in alignment etc & the print quality is also not great. And for the
LaTeX templates. We are currently using existing templates. We plan to allow
create custom templates soon :)

------
manpreetrules
Nice work!

Suggestion: A lot of requests going to the server when creating a resume. Use
local storage for storing the data and send it to the server once when user
clicks the save button.

~~~
cvsintellect
We are thinking of local storage. There were multiple challenges related to
it. Sending all data at once would make save slower. and when you save some
small change a lot of data would have to be resaved at once. By splitting the
data save into chunks we thought would give best performance - user experience
balance. We will rethink on this and get back to you. thank you for your time
:)

~~~
manpreetrules
There is overhead for every request, one large request is generally faster
than several small ones of the same size.

You have to be smart to send the data that is changed or client side
compression is another option.

~~~
cvsintellect
by chunking data to be saved we dont have to send all the data at all. so when
you are saving personal info your position related data is not sent to server.
but we send all personal related data again to save. this we thought reduced
lot of complexity on the backend and gave best user experience by reducing
number of clicks for saving data.

------
kirk21
Great tool for academics! Cool that you can add special sections like patents.

(disclosure: we are building a tool for researchers to write better papers:
bohr.launchrock.com)

~~~
cvsintellect
Amazing :) you should have a look at our credits page
[https://www.cvsintellect.com/public/page/credits](https://www.cvsintellect.com/public/page/credits)
on what we used to build this tool. You can ask for any further information
which we will try our best to provide them! :)

------
ByronFortescue
Some insights on how to make a good resume:
[http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html](http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html)

~~~
cvsintellect
Thank you for the post. we will have a look at it and get back. we have tried
to incorporate as many professional cv "rules" as we could.

------
rem1313
Any chance of opensourcing this? This could be great as a tool for teams that
participate in tenders that have common projects (link against project
database).

~~~
cvsintellect
We are thinking about this. We want to open-source most of the stuff but not
the security related code. Infact we have started an open-source project to
teach our learning from the project
[http://cvsintellect.tumblr.com/post/57157924548/open-
source-...](http://cvsintellect.tumblr.com/post/57157924548/open-source-at-
cvsintellect). We will think a bit more on this and get back to you. Thanks
for your interest.

------
kleiba
The template previews don't work for me: if I click on a template picture, I
get a preview image of about the same size as the thumbnail I clicked on.

~~~
cvsintellect
Sorry about that. For now you can use these links for template previews:
[http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Modern.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadersh...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Leadership.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Euro.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Standard...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Standard.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Article....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Article.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic....](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Classic.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Contempo...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Contemporary.pdf) [http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Urbane.p...](http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-
resumes/Urbane.pdf)

------
pagade
How to I delete Objectives section? I am in 'Manage Sections' but how do I
delete it?

~~~
cvsintellect
just dont fill anything in that section it wont appear on your resume! :)

~~~
pagade
'Remove Custom Section' \- So Objective is not custom section. Hmmm.

~~~
cvsintellect
yes. we will remember to make it more intuitive. Thank you for your interest!

------
rapid_snail
This is very good, but there does not seem to be any way to download the tex
script?

~~~
cvsintellect
[copied from below post] just create your resume and drop in a mail through
contact us and we will send you the tex script :)

~~~
rapid_snail
Sure, but consider adding a feature to download the tex script.

~~~
cvsintellect
surely! thank you for your time :)

------
syldor
Great app! Is it possible to have the LaTeX code generated ?

~~~
cvsintellect
yes as we mentioned in one of our above comments just create your resume and
drop in a mail through contact us and we will send you the tex script.

