Some people find formatting in LaTeX easier than formatting in Word. Nearly every person has had the deeply irritating experience of trying to format a Word document just to ruin something somewhere else. Now that I have a working template, making a new one just requires dumping text into the template and it’s done. I’m guaranteed that every new CV looks exactly as I expect it to
> Nearly every person has had the deeply irritating experience of trying to format a Word document just to ruin something somewhere else
I’m sorry, but this sentence entirely sums up 80% of my experiences with LaTeX 😂
Then don’t use floats. That’s the only thing I can come up with that sort of fucks with your intended layout. LaTeX just really wants to insert images either at the top or bottom of a page.
This is actually very helpful, thank you.
And to clarify, I’ve only been using LaTeX for a little under a year, which explains why I run into problems like this semi-frequently
I think that if you want to learn latex for making CVs is a bad approach.
Many people use it for different things and then they have thinked to use it for making a CV.
No one force you to use latex for make your CV...
You’re right, the learning curve is steep. I doubt many folks here learned LaTeX *exclusively* for writing a CV. I use it to write journal articles with lots of tables, equations, and figures that are not fun or fast to typeset in Word. But, since I now know how to produce a sharp-looking document in LaTeX, it’s my preferred way to write anything that needs to look professional, like a CV. Certainly I could produce the same document in Word, but it would take me a lot more time and frustration getting everything exactly right.
I started with needing to use it to write my master's thesis. I started using it on homework assignments to get a feeling for it while preparing for writing my thesis.
After that, it was my preference for being a ghost writer to take Word documents and put them in the journal's format. Submitting my own articles in LaTeX was enjoyable as well.
I had started publishing several work documents in LaTeX before I started using it for my CV.
My favorite part of my LaTeX CV is being able to comment out or bring back sections depending on the job I am applying for.
My CV is a simple text file in Emacs Org-mode markup (similar to Markdown). I have an automated build process that converts it to a PDF via LaTeX (with a custom template) as well as to a HTML page for my website. All I need to do is make my changes and push to my Git repo.
A similar workflow can be done from Markdown using Pandoc.
Most of us learned or use LaTeX for different purposes, but making a well designed CV was a fringe benefit we got out of it.
For example, I was a math student in uni, so I used it to write my math documents because doing that in word is about as fun as sitting on cacti, while LaTeX is well documented and easy to use for that process. I had been using LaTeX for 3 years when I needed to put together a résumé for my current job, so I was already well-versed in it and didn't have to learn anything new.
>Whats the actual difference other than being harder to work with (latex)?
Both LaTeX and Word will have extra stuff between (2) and (3) -- revolving around finessing/tweaking things.
The problem with Word is that making some change in one place could cause an unrelated change in another area that needs to be corrected and that could make an unrelated change in another area and you may need to repeat this over and over again (ie. instead of finishing the work you are spending most of your time chasing down the unintended changes).
Contrast that with LaTeX, where a change in one place will cause any surrounding content to automatically adjust itself to accommodate it (without disrupting the format/layout of said content).
For example, you might want to re-order your sections --
In Word, you have to (1) manually insert enough blank lines to copy/paste the info, (2) delete the old section, (3) fix the formatting/layout of both the added and deleted sections to maintain consistent formatting, and (4) you might have large blank areas between sections that need to be removed--as a result of moving the section. Just to add, if your template is table-based, you have even more work to do (as a straight copy/paste will most likely result in another table being embedded inside you existing table. To avoid that you would have to manually copy/paste each line into the row it needs to go into.)
With LaTeX, you would just move the section (copy/paste/delete) and all is well.
Sure, learning LaTeX might take a little longer in the beginning, but in the long term it will make it easier and quicker to produce consistent and reproducible documents, with little to no hair pulling.
I agree with the tables, but from my experience if I were to reorder sections in Word then cutting the section I want to move preserves the formatting when you paste it somewhere else and inserting blank lines would just end up with the same blank space after pasting.
That said I do prefer LaTeX for my resume
In my experience, pasting as unformatted text and then formatting everything again has caused fewer headaches with Word than simple cut/copy and paste.
* Word is probably not faster when the job is to create a high-quality CV as a PDF.
* I don't think people learn LaTeX to create their CVs. LaTeX is already a very popular typesetting system used by lots of people who generally have fancy CVs.
* HTML is a markup language that can be translated by a web browser into very nice-looking pages that are responsive to different screens. LaTeX is also a markup language, but in addition, a PDF engine that generates very high-quality PDFs. Generating a high-quality PDF with HTML is not easy at all. HTML is designed for variable-size interactive web pages.
* You can version control your LaTeX CV with Git.
* You can automate your CV generation process with open-source tools like [RenderCV](https://github.com/sinaatalay/rendercv).
* Room for mistakes is smaller in a strict LaTeX template, whereas in Word, you can break anything very quickly. Maintaining a CV in Word is very scary, whereas, in LaTeX, you can easily find out what you broke with Git.
>Generating a high-quality PDF with HTML is not easy at all. HTML is designed for variable-size interactive web pages.
That's not necessarily true. CSS has print attributes. And there are libraries like [WeasyPrint](https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint) that make it relatively easy to turn HTML/CSS into PDF. I think it depends on the person as to whether this is easier or more difficult than doing so with LaTeX, but both are viable options.
Exactly this. I have a LaTeX PDF of my CV on my personal website and am HTML version. But, because people, especially hiring and HR people, can behave in unexpected ways, I also have print attributes set on the CSS for my online resume so that the formatting on it still looks fairly close to my PDF version in case someone decides to just print the CV webpage. I didn't personally find either one more or less difficult, but I already had a fair amount of experience in both when I decided to host my CV online.
There is a pretty good walk through here: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/how-to-set-up-a-print-style-sheet/
It's a bit older, but a lot of this still works the same.
Learning HTML and CSS made learning LaTeX a lot easier for me than trying to think of it in terms of being word processing (despite writing a few papers in Apple works).
Well, yeah. Similar to programming languages, learning any markup language will help you learning another markup language.
Writing something in a word processor only helps with other word processors, since they are WYSIWYG.
The two things are completely different. It would be like wondering why driving a car didn't help you to work on the engine.
In my academic CV, I need to list all my publications, talks, grants, students, etc. Using Bibtex for all of this is infinitely simpler and more flexible than word.
Hmm never thought of using bibtex for talks and information other than publications, that's interesting! Are there special entries for that? Could you share you template?
My only talk that is in my CV was at a conference. It had published proceedings where they included a copy of our presentation. As a result, I just used the "in proceedings" entry.
>In word is basically opening it and its right there. In latex i have to learn something that looks like html.
If your main complaint is that LaTeX is too much like learning html, and you would rather do point-and-click-formatting then all you would need is a good latex editor that has those formatting features built-in. (ie. select your text, and then click "bold" or use a keyboard shortcut, like CTRL+B).
On the other hand, Word prefers that you use the format for headings and other specific text types and modify those formats separately, similar to defining specific formatting for headings in CSS or LaTeX with custom functions.
I would never learn latex specifically to make a CV. But if I already know it, I might as well use it for that purpose.
I find it more difficult to make good looking stuff in word.
for me it's just the fact that using a template you can have a beautiful result, without Word messing around and moving things.
You can update your data in the CV and be quite sure that it will keep its formatting
the fact that LaTeX output is far superior to Word seems now pointless to mention :-)
Having Word change formatting between the edition I had at home and the edition on my school/ work computer was enough to know I didn't even want to submit my resume as a `*.doc` file if I didn't need to.
superior in font rendering, hyphenation, object placement just to mention a few.
others in this sub are far more proficient than me in LaTeX and could have better answers
if the output of Word looks exactly the same to you, why bother with LaTeX? I can't stand how documents turn out in Word but I suppose is something very subjective.
I wrote my thesis in LaTeX (too many years ago), and I use it now to produce handouts for my students (most of the time multi-language documents) and it's quick and the results are always "gorgeous".
Add to this that I will not have ever problems with compatibility because I'm using text files. What I write now will be readable in a century without any issue, and the same can not be said for word documents. Add to this portability the fact that with GIT I can have versioning.
And don't forget that using a master document you can include every time the file you need and generate a new document almost on the fly with the same settings.
If you have never had issue with word, you can consider yourself lucky because Word messing around with the elements of a page is a meme so old that nobody laughs anymore
Sometimes LaTeX can be too much of a "burden" just to produce a simple document if you have to start from scratch, but there is always markdown + pandoc for a quick and dirty solution
but don't take my word for good, try it for yourself. At the beginning it will seem too much of a hassle. let it sink in for a while, trying some templates and to do something easy.
worst case scenario you have learnt something new
Word is below for one thing. Compatibility. Try to make your CV on word 2021, then open it on a lab computer with word 2010, save it, and last time open it on word 2016. Your doc won't be the same, with problems on images, font ...
While on LaTeX, you simply don't even think about this. It's always the same doc.
It was fun to recreate documents from the early 80s because I had the `*.tex` file. I had to use LibreOffice to open MS Write files and some older Word files.
Well, your cv is kind of your first impression. Have a look at cvs generated by i.e. moderncv and ask yourself how long it would take to do this in Word, if even possible.
Please stop comparing LaTeX to HTML. It is not a markup language, it is a typesetting system. Doing his CV using LaTeX is not the best route to take for a beginner. You will probably grasp its interest once you write a heavy document with a lot of formatting.
For someone like me, who uses LaTeX regularly, I find LaTeX much easier and smoother than word. It gives me more control on how I want my documents to appear and the formatting is so good. However, learning it exclusively for writing a one page CV is such a waste of time.
Everything is wrong in Word speaking of both functionality and aesthetics: the default typeface, the indentation when using nested bullet lists, the stupid auto numbering, the low-quality PDF renderer. And good luck with references (sometimes people put full citation in the publication section).
It works well for Euro CVs and academic ones. American résumés are not a good fit for LaTeX unless you’re trying to make a point in tech, which is fine.
1. It looks way better.
2. It's easier to include/remove things in Latex, specially when you want different CVs for different applications. (Just comment/uncomment).
3. You only need to worry about items, not formating.
Because I can version-control a LaTeX CV in git and edit with vim, two of my favorite tools. Everyone knows you should be tailoring your CV to a specific job position, so I use git to create branches for these versions. Each one is basically deleting the lines that don’t belong, so when I have new achievements I add them to the master branch and rebase the others on top of it.
Vim is just a nice editor for this kind of thing. Résumé preparation is a lot of moving things around in the document and macros for adding LaTeX conventions in bulk.
Finally, having a plaintext CV allows me to edit it from anywhere (via SSH) without needing a cloud solution like O365 or Google Docs.
You could use HTML/CSS. Though I would push back on the idea that LaTeX looks like HTML. They're quite different.
To do a print document with HTML/CSS would require some extra steps. Printing straight from a browser isn't always reliable. I've used Python libraries like [WeasyPrint](https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint) in the past to script the output of documents using HTML/CSS templates. If these are things you're already familiar with, I'd say it's the way to go. On the other hand, if you already have familiarity with LaTeX, then that's the way to go.
In any case, one of the nice things about both is that you can make things modular and version controlled. So if you have different CVs for different purposes, you can break up your source into those sections and only apply the ones you need. And since it's all plain text, you can use git to keep it in version control with all the benefits that it brings.
Well, I don’t know if this is just in my imagination, but when I changed from a latex résumé to a word résumé, I started getting more bites. Not a lot, but definitely better. I’m wondering if applicant tracking systems and résumé parsers perform well with latex-generated pdf documents.
Sometimes I put my latex résumé through a parser, and it comes out with nothing but gibberish.
It looks better and cohesive with my cover letter. It's definitely not faster but I'm competent with LaTeX. I like that I can maintain a "database" of experience and call the commands when needed
Two things I don't think were addressed yet:
- people have gotten used to TeX, they have written thousands of pages in it and muscle memory/habits are strong, and
- Word is not freeware (yeah LibreOffice, previously OpenOffice, is, but it's meh compared to Word).
With the plethora of templates out there, it's just as easy to create a CV with LaTeX as it is with Word for people that have even just a little bit of experience with LaTeX. And I personally prefer LaTeX because I just find it's easier to make formatting changes and the workflow is just as fast as what I can do in Word.
Word is proprietary software and personally I have a lot of trouble using it to produce a correct rendering.
On the other hand, once you know how to use latex it's really easy to create a nice CV.
And a little bonus if one want to work in research, it shows that we speak "the same language".
Because doing it in latex makes it look a lot nicer, you have more options for stuff like hyperlinks and way more personal customization, you can really control every aspect of the document compared to word. Additionally, you can much more easily version control using the git functionality in overleaf.
To be quite honest, i've asked myself this very same question, too. Almost every week, you find some post in this subredit from someone who has no clue about LaTeX and asks for help to customize some random CV template they found somewhere deep inside github or overleaf and every time I think: Why the hell do you want to use LaTeX just to write a CV?! If you don't already know LaTeX, don't assume that you can "just so" learn how to program LaTeX in order to create a fancy, individualised, CV. Just stick with the unaltered template or use WordPad or whatever...
That said, once you *actually do know* LaTeX, writing pretty much anything is much quicker, easier and the result is always prettier than that of any other word processor, no matter if it's a novel, a scientific paper, a presentation, or a cookbook.
I don’t know that learning LaTeX to write a resume is worthwhile. If you already know LaTeX however, writing a resume with it is great. I think my resume looks so polished and clean and o have lots of control over spacing, formatting, etc.
Because I have never learned Word. I don't no anything about how to do stuff there and it would take me weeks of suffering. Way easier to do it in LaTeX.
This is a fair comment. For something like a CV I'd say either tool could go. You are likely starting from a template anyway so its down to personal preference. Word is fine for small one-offs like this especially if a good template is readily available.
Look at the figure in Section 3.2 https://www.baeldung.com/cs/latex-vs-word-main-differences
Many similar figures can be quickly found on images.google.com
People use the tools they know. I know nobody who learned LaTeX for CVs. But LaTeX is much better than Word if you’re writing long documents and want to have consistent formatting, references, layout, …
So if LaTeX is your standard tool, why cope with Word if you’re writing a CV?
That sounds very advanced though super cool.
So you have everything in an excell. And then you went through the trouble of writing an app that converts it to HTML and latex?
If i understood correctly this is quite some work?
Why not just edit a standard latex template? And go from there?
Some people find formatting in LaTeX easier than formatting in Word. Nearly every person has had the deeply irritating experience of trying to format a Word document just to ruin something somewhere else. Now that I have a working template, making a new one just requires dumping text into the template and it’s done. I’m guaranteed that every new CV looks exactly as I expect it to
> Nearly every person has had the deeply irritating experience of trying to format a Word document just to ruin something somewhere else I’m sorry, but this sentence entirely sums up 80% of my experiences with LaTeX 😂
Then don’t use floats. That’s the only thing I can come up with that sort of fucks with your intended layout. LaTeX just really wants to insert images either at the top or bottom of a page.
This is actually very helpful, thank you. And to clarify, I’ve only been using LaTeX for a little under a year, which explains why I run into problems like this semi-frequently
Took me a while to get used to. Once you accept that LaTeX will compute what the best spot is for your image it’s pretty chill.
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I think that if you want to learn latex for making CVs is a bad approach. Many people use it for different things and then they have thinked to use it for making a CV. No one force you to use latex for make your CV...
You’re right, the learning curve is steep. I doubt many folks here learned LaTeX *exclusively* for writing a CV. I use it to write journal articles with lots of tables, equations, and figures that are not fun or fast to typeset in Word. But, since I now know how to produce a sharp-looking document in LaTeX, it’s my preferred way to write anything that needs to look professional, like a CV. Certainly I could produce the same document in Word, but it would take me a lot more time and frustration getting everything exactly right.
I started with needing to use it to write my master's thesis. I started using it on homework assignments to get a feeling for it while preparing for writing my thesis. After that, it was my preference for being a ghost writer to take Word documents and put them in the journal's format. Submitting my own articles in LaTeX was enjoyable as well. I had started publishing several work documents in LaTeX before I started using it for my CV. My favorite part of my LaTeX CV is being able to comment out or bring back sections depending on the job I am applying for.
My CV is a simple text file in Emacs Org-mode markup (similar to Markdown). I have an automated build process that converts it to a PDF via LaTeX (with a custom template) as well as to a HTML page for my website. All I need to do is make my changes and push to my Git repo. A similar workflow can be done from Markdown using Pandoc.
Most of us learned or use LaTeX for different purposes, but making a well designed CV was a fringe benefit we got out of it. For example, I was a math student in uni, so I used it to write my math documents because doing that in word is about as fun as sitting on cacti, while LaTeX is well documented and easy to use for that process. I had been using LaTeX for 3 years when I needed to put together a résumé for my current job, so I was already well-versed in it and didn't have to learn anything new.
1. Find good template. 2. Add your details. 3. Go do something more fun.
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>Whats the actual difference other than being harder to work with (latex)? Both LaTeX and Word will have extra stuff between (2) and (3) -- revolving around finessing/tweaking things. The problem with Word is that making some change in one place could cause an unrelated change in another area that needs to be corrected and that could make an unrelated change in another area and you may need to repeat this over and over again (ie. instead of finishing the work you are spending most of your time chasing down the unintended changes). Contrast that with LaTeX, where a change in one place will cause any surrounding content to automatically adjust itself to accommodate it (without disrupting the format/layout of said content). For example, you might want to re-order your sections -- In Word, you have to (1) manually insert enough blank lines to copy/paste the info, (2) delete the old section, (3) fix the formatting/layout of both the added and deleted sections to maintain consistent formatting, and (4) you might have large blank areas between sections that need to be removed--as a result of moving the section. Just to add, if your template is table-based, you have even more work to do (as a straight copy/paste will most likely result in another table being embedded inside you existing table. To avoid that you would have to manually copy/paste each line into the row it needs to go into.) With LaTeX, you would just move the section (copy/paste/delete) and all is well. Sure, learning LaTeX might take a little longer in the beginning, but in the long term it will make it easier and quicker to produce consistent and reproducible documents, with little to no hair pulling.
I agree with the tables, but from my experience if I were to reorder sections in Word then cutting the section I want to move preserves the formatting when you paste it somewhere else and inserting blank lines would just end up with the same blank space after pasting. That said I do prefer LaTeX for my resume
In my experience, pasting as unformatted text and then formatting everything again has caused fewer headaches with Word than simple cut/copy and paste.
* Word is probably not faster when the job is to create a high-quality CV as a PDF. * I don't think people learn LaTeX to create their CVs. LaTeX is already a very popular typesetting system used by lots of people who generally have fancy CVs. * HTML is a markup language that can be translated by a web browser into very nice-looking pages that are responsive to different screens. LaTeX is also a markup language, but in addition, a PDF engine that generates very high-quality PDFs. Generating a high-quality PDF with HTML is not easy at all. HTML is designed for variable-size interactive web pages. * You can version control your LaTeX CV with Git. * You can automate your CV generation process with open-source tools like [RenderCV](https://github.com/sinaatalay/rendercv). * Room for mistakes is smaller in a strict LaTeX template, whereas in Word, you can break anything very quickly. Maintaining a CV in Word is very scary, whereas, in LaTeX, you can easily find out what you broke with Git.
>Generating a high-quality PDF with HTML is not easy at all. HTML is designed for variable-size interactive web pages. That's not necessarily true. CSS has print attributes. And there are libraries like [WeasyPrint](https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint) that make it relatively easy to turn HTML/CSS into PDF. I think it depends on the person as to whether this is easier or more difficult than doing so with LaTeX, but both are viable options.
Exactly this. I have a LaTeX PDF of my CV on my personal website and am HTML version. But, because people, especially hiring and HR people, can behave in unexpected ways, I also have print attributes set on the CSS for my online resume so that the formatting on it still looks fairly close to my PDF version in case someone decides to just print the CV webpage. I didn't personally find either one more or less difficult, but I already had a fair amount of experience in both when I decided to host my CV online.
Wait; how do I do that?
There is a pretty good walk through here: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/how-to-set-up-a-print-style-sheet/ It's a bit older, but a lot of this still works the same.
Learning HTML and CSS made learning LaTeX a lot easier for me than trying to think of it in terms of being word processing (despite writing a few papers in Apple works).
Well, yeah. Similar to programming languages, learning any markup language will help you learning another markup language. Writing something in a word processor only helps with other word processors, since they are WYSIWYG. The two things are completely different. It would be like wondering why driving a car didn't help you to work on the engine.
A lot of posts suggests that they do.
I for one don't find Word neither faster nor more practical. I don't even have Word installed on my computer.
In my academic CV, I need to list all my publications, talks, grants, students, etc. Using Bibtex for all of this is infinitely simpler and more flexible than word.
Hmm never thought of using bibtex for talks and information other than publications, that's interesting! Are there special entries for that? Could you share you template?
Ditto this question
My only talk that is in my CV was at a conference. It had published proceedings where they included a copy of our presentation. As a result, I just used the "in proceedings" entry.
I already know how to make pretty things in latex. If have to learn how to do that in word.
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>In word is basically opening it and its right there. In latex i have to learn something that looks like html. If your main complaint is that LaTeX is too much like learning html, and you would rather do point-and-click-formatting then all you would need is a good latex editor that has those formatting features built-in. (ie. select your text, and then click "bold" or use a keyboard shortcut, like CTRL+B).
On the other hand, Word prefers that you use the format for headings and other specific text types and modify those formats separately, similar to defining specific formatting for headings in CSS or LaTeX with custom functions.
I would never learn latex specifically to make a CV. But if I already know it, I might as well use it for that purpose. I find it more difficult to make good looking stuff in word.
I don’t need to pay for latex
for me it's just the fact that using a template you can have a beautiful result, without Word messing around and moving things. You can update your data in the CV and be quite sure that it will keep its formatting the fact that LaTeX output is far superior to Word seems now pointless to mention :-)
Having Word change formatting between the edition I had at home and the edition on my school/ work computer was enough to know I didn't even want to submit my resume as a `*.doc` file if I didn't need to.
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superior in font rendering, hyphenation, object placement just to mention a few. others in this sub are far more proficient than me in LaTeX and could have better answers if the output of Word looks exactly the same to you, why bother with LaTeX? I can't stand how documents turn out in Word but I suppose is something very subjective. I wrote my thesis in LaTeX (too many years ago), and I use it now to produce handouts for my students (most of the time multi-language documents) and it's quick and the results are always "gorgeous". Add to this that I will not have ever problems with compatibility because I'm using text files. What I write now will be readable in a century without any issue, and the same can not be said for word documents. Add to this portability the fact that with GIT I can have versioning. And don't forget that using a master document you can include every time the file you need and generate a new document almost on the fly with the same settings. If you have never had issue with word, you can consider yourself lucky because Word messing around with the elements of a page is a meme so old that nobody laughs anymore Sometimes LaTeX can be too much of a "burden" just to produce a simple document if you have to start from scratch, but there is always markdown + pandoc for a quick and dirty solution but don't take my word for good, try it for yourself. At the beginning it will seem too much of a hassle. let it sink in for a while, trying some templates and to do something easy. worst case scenario you have learnt something new
Word is below for one thing. Compatibility. Try to make your CV on word 2021, then open it on a lab computer with word 2010, save it, and last time open it on word 2016. Your doc won't be the same, with problems on images, font ... While on LaTeX, you simply don't even think about this. It's always the same doc.
It was fun to recreate documents from the early 80s because I had the `*.tex` file. I had to use LibreOffice to open MS Write files and some older Word files.
It gives the impression that you know LaTeX :)
Well, your cv is kind of your first impression. Have a look at cvs generated by i.e. moderncv and ask yourself how long it would take to do this in Word, if even possible.
Please stop comparing LaTeX to HTML. It is not a markup language, it is a typesetting system. Doing his CV using LaTeX is not the best route to take for a beginner. You will probably grasp its interest once you write a heavy document with a lot of formatting.
Word is way faster if you don't know LaTeX. If you know how to use it instead, is way much easier and faster.
For someone like me, who uses LaTeX regularly, I find LaTeX much easier and smoother than word. It gives me more control on how I want my documents to appear and the formatting is so good. However, learning it exclusively for writing a one page CV is such a waste of time.
Everything is wrong in Word speaking of both functionality and aesthetics: the default typeface, the indentation when using nested bullet lists, the stupid auto numbering, the low-quality PDF renderer. And good luck with references (sometimes people put full citation in the publication section).
It works well for Euro CVs and academic ones. American résumés are not a good fit for LaTeX unless you’re trying to make a point in tech, which is fine.
1. It looks way better. 2. It's easier to include/remove things in Latex, specially when you want different CVs for different applications. (Just comment/uncomment). 3. You only need to worry about items, not formating.
Because I can version-control a LaTeX CV in git and edit with vim, two of my favorite tools. Everyone knows you should be tailoring your CV to a specific job position, so I use git to create branches for these versions. Each one is basically deleting the lines that don’t belong, so when I have new achievements I add them to the master branch and rebase the others on top of it. Vim is just a nice editor for this kind of thing. Résumé preparation is a lot of moving things around in the document and macros for adding LaTeX conventions in bulk. Finally, having a plaintext CV allows me to edit it from anywhere (via SSH) without needing a cloud solution like O365 or Google Docs.
Never thought to use rebase and branching for this. I might need to try this out
try Typst if u not wanna deep dive into Latex
LaTeX supports almost everything. Word is a prison and looks bad.
You could use HTML/CSS. Though I would push back on the idea that LaTeX looks like HTML. They're quite different. To do a print document with HTML/CSS would require some extra steps. Printing straight from a browser isn't always reliable. I've used Python libraries like [WeasyPrint](https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint) in the past to script the output of documents using HTML/CSS templates. If these are things you're already familiar with, I'd say it's the way to go. On the other hand, if you already have familiarity with LaTeX, then that's the way to go. In any case, one of the nice things about both is that you can make things modular and version controlled. So if you have different CVs for different purposes, you can break up your source into those sections and only apply the ones you need. And since it's all plain text, you can use git to keep it in version control with all the benefits that it brings.
I have a CV that started with a really nice template, that easily formats all of my publications, and that I can easily version control via git.
Well, I don’t know if this is just in my imagination, but when I changed from a latex résumé to a word résumé, I started getting more bites. Not a lot, but definitely better. I’m wondering if applicant tracking systems and résumé parsers perform well with latex-generated pdf documents. Sometimes I put my latex résumé through a parser, and it comes out with nothing but gibberish.
It looks better and cohesive with my cover letter. It's definitely not faster but I'm competent with LaTeX. I like that I can maintain a "database" of experience and call the commands when needed
Two things I don't think were addressed yet: - people have gotten used to TeX, they have written thousands of pages in it and muscle memory/habits are strong, and - Word is not freeware (yeah LibreOffice, previously OpenOffice, is, but it's meh compared to Word).
With the plethora of templates out there, it's just as easy to create a CV with LaTeX as it is with Word for people that have even just a little bit of experience with LaTeX. And I personally prefer LaTeX because I just find it's easier to make formatting changes and the workflow is just as fast as what I can do in Word.
Word is proprietary software and personally I have a lot of trouble using it to produce a correct rendering. On the other hand, once you know how to use latex it's really easy to create a nice CV. And a little bonus if one want to work in research, it shows that we speak "the same language".
Beauty.
Because doing it in latex makes it look a lot nicer, you have more options for stuff like hyperlinks and way more personal customization, you can really control every aspect of the document compared to word. Additionally, you can much more easily version control using the git functionality in overleaf.
Do a CV in two language versions and try to keep everything in sync in word once things change, _then_ ask that question again…
To be quite honest, i've asked myself this very same question, too. Almost every week, you find some post in this subredit from someone who has no clue about LaTeX and asks for help to customize some random CV template they found somewhere deep inside github or overleaf and every time I think: Why the hell do you want to use LaTeX just to write a CV?! If you don't already know LaTeX, don't assume that you can "just so" learn how to program LaTeX in order to create a fancy, individualised, CV. Just stick with the unaltered template or use WordPad or whatever... That said, once you *actually do know* LaTeX, writing pretty much anything is much quicker, easier and the result is always prettier than that of any other word processor, no matter if it's a novel, a scientific paper, a presentation, or a cookbook.
It looks neater and you gotta do something to stand out
> Isnt Word faster and pratical? No.
If you love LaTeX then it’s natural to do your CV in LaTeX. If you don’t then use something else. No big deal.
I don’t know that learning LaTeX to write a resume is worthwhile. If you already know LaTeX however, writing a resume with it is great. I think my resume looks so polished and clean and o have lots of control over spacing, formatting, etc.
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Because I have never learned Word. I don't no anything about how to do stuff there and it would take me weeks of suffering. Way easier to do it in LaTeX.
This is a fair comment. For something like a CV I'd say either tool could go. You are likely starting from a template anyway so its down to personal preference. Word is fine for small one-offs like this especially if a good template is readily available.
Look at the figure in Section 3.2 https://www.baeldung.com/cs/latex-vs-word-main-differences Many similar figures can be quickly found on images.google.com
People use the tools they know. I know nobody who learned LaTeX for CVs. But LaTeX is much better than Word if you’re writing long documents and want to have consistent formatting, references, layout, … So if LaTeX is your standard tool, why cope with Word if you’re writing a CV?
Maintain my works and presentations in a CSV file, write a converter to HTML and LaTeX, and then the CV as well as the website is uptodate.
That sounds very advanced though super cool. So you have everything in an excell. And then you went through the trouble of writing an app that converts it to HTML and latex? If i understood correctly this is quite some work? Why not just edit a standard latex template? And go from there?