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.

  • monomon@programming.dev
    4·
    17 hours ago

    Similarly to Onno, I write everything in markdown first, and convert using pandoc. Then I use weasyprint to take the resulting HTML with CSS applied on it, and generate a PDF from all that.

    The result is quite nice, and this system has served me for more thant 15 years. A friend working in HR shared that it does stand out, compared to most submissions.

    Here’s a fragment of Makefile to summarize the concept:

    docname=2026

all:
	pandoc -t html5 ${docname}.md -o ${docname}.html
	weasyprint -s ${docname}.css ${docname}.html ${docname}.pdf
      • monomon@programming.dev
        1·
        16 hours ago

        Since it was a while ago I’ve forgotten, but I think it didn’t interpret the stylesheets correctly. I should probably recheck, because it may have been fixed.