It’s that time again and I’d like to make my life easier. I have multiple CVs for different positions and in different languages. Recruiters and companies want the CVs in PDF.
My current workflow is to sequentially edit the .odts (wording then layout because things move around depending on length), maybe the style, then save and export to PDF. That can take a while, so here I am, wondering if it can be sped up by simply editing a text file and generating CVs with certain themes.
Or what your workflow is. Maybe this isn’t worth automating…
Solution
Finally went with RenderCV (thank you @bert@sh.itjust.works), which also runs locally. YAML in, PDF, PNG, HTML, etc. out. It comes with 10 themes or so. Haven’t looked at what it take to create my own (I’m lazy).
Contender was JSON Resume, but the site is down and I tried it years ago but never got it to work properly.


What are you talking about?
Save a random website, convert the html to markdown.
Given that HTML supports significantly more formatting than markdown, it’s completely unsurprising that any conversion is imperfect, this is not a flaw in pandoc, it’s simply not possible.
I’ll also point out that I was suggesting that OP starts with markdown and converts that to a required output format using pandoc. The barrier to entry is significantly less than using LaTeX for example.
Sure it’s possible. Different markup languages have different levels of features: some like Markdown only very basic elements, some like asciidoc, orgmode, docbook, html, more differrentiated. There’s 3 approaches converting from complexer to simpler formats:
- list, figure + figcaption to![alt]() *caption*, stuff like that)I know of Typora doing a good job with the convenient approach, though still partially lossless.
Sylpheed (E-Mail client) does a good job at the lossy approach, for plain text display of html.
pandoc does the lossless approach well. But it laso depends on which of the multitude of markdown outputs you’ve picked.