Note: For an updated version of my CV, see Jonas Wagner's CV.
Faced with the need to update my CV, I pondered the possible toolchains:
- My previous CV was written using LibreOffice. This worked fairly well, even though it lacked coolness and precise control over the layout.
- Many colleagues use LaTeX (shudder).
- My flatmate suggested that I use a plain text file.
I found the last option intriguing. I really like plain-text files, especially in combination with light-weight markup such as MarkDown. This is the technology behind the blog you’re reading; it works very well for web publishing. Tool support for editing, version control etc. is great… but would it be appropriate for writing a CV?
It turns out that today’s web developers have great control over how websites are printed. CSS properties can control font families and weights, page margins and breaks, and even typographic features like columns, soft hyphens, or orphan lines. After a bit of reading on this, I assembled my toolchain:
-
git init .is a standard command to execute at the beginning of a new project. -
Using LibreOffice and Pandoc, I converted my old CV from
.odf→.docx→.md. This was a great starting point. -
Vim is my tool of choice for editing the MarkDown file.
-
After I was done updating the CV, I converted it to HTML using Pandoc. The tool allows its users to control every aspect of the document template being used, and also contains a lot of options to make the appearance nicer (e.g., turning apostrophes into typographic quotes).
-
The result looked basic, but all the content was there. Time for some styling! I started by adding normalize.css, and then adjusted the style sheet until the document satisfied my gusto.
Most of the styling was done with the HTML document open in Chrome. For those features that were related to document layout, I used the print preview to see the effect of the changes.
It’s noteworthy that the process is much more WYSIWYG than one might think, because CSS properties can be adjusted dynamically using Chrome’s developer tools.
-
Time to convert the document to PDF! Chrome’s print-to-PDF and the Quartz renderer did a good job. They even preserved hyperlinks, so that readers can open referenced websites directly from their PDF reader.
-
The last missing point is PDF metadata. It would be nice if the author and subject of the document were set correctly. Enter PDFTK, which performs a final pass over the PDF file to update these fields.
Here’s the resulting CV. What do you think about it? Feedback is very welcome. Internships too… please refer to my CV if you’re interested :)
I also made the source code of the CV publicly available. If you’d like to see the CSS styles or Pandoc command line options, this is the place to go. I hereby publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license; share, tweak, use, and enjoy!