I sometimes wonder why nobody ever attaches real world success data for different styles of resumes. Like most(?) people, my resume has also undergone an evolution in style and layout. I would gladly trade whatever I find aesthetically pleasing about mine, if that meant a greater success rate in having my resume read/chosen.
Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
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Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#12RStudio (IDE for R) has a great MarkDown to PDF, Word or HTML using Pandoc. http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/pdf_document_format.html
Might help you to see their process. You can do the whole thing with CLI but easy in their IDE.
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#13I sometimes wonder why nobody ever attaches real world success data for different styles of resumes. Like most(?) people, my resume has also undergone an evolution in style and layout. I would gladly trade whatever I find aesthetically pleasing about mine, if that meant a greater success rate in having my resume read/chosen.
I don't think that kind of data would be useful. It's kind of like asking "what do I have to do to make my song a #1 hit?" It depends entirely on what the mood is of the people who happen to be looking at your resume, and the culture that guides the judgements they make about it.
I had spent a good deal of effort building a very simple and pleasing resume using LaTeX, and I ended up having a professional career counselor look at it, and she said "Did you use a template? It looks too much like a template." So what? Templates are templates because they look good. If it didn't look like a template, it wouldn't look professional. And something that should've elicited a complement was instead peddled as disappointment.
Instead, I'll just figure that I wouldn't want to work for anybody that trusts people who are too petty or too clueless to make good hiring decisions.
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#14They look great. Installing pandoc is a pain, though. My CV is LaTeX as well—using the moderncv template—and I build it regularly on both GNU/Linux and Mac OS X:
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#15I just use a Makefile[1] for this, I just type 'make', and it builds it and uses xdg-open to open it in my PDF viewer. Much faster than waiting for ShareLaTeX or similar web apps to re-render. Gummi[2] is also nice for instant feedback, and you don't need to get the whole toolchain working by hand. 1: https://gist.github.com/rhinoceraptor/8b7e9bf650db6396e27e 2: https://github.com/alexandervdm/gummi
You can try latexmk, it does almost all of the work when building LaTeX (including getting cross-references right) and can even watch for changes and rebuild the document when necessary, updating your PDF reader too. Just calling _latexmk -pdf -silent -xelatex -pvc mydoc.tex_ should suffice (the -pvc option is for the continuous build and preview mode).
I couldn't get it to work on Windows previously.. is it any better now? :O
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#16I sometimes wonder why nobody ever attaches real world success data for different styles of resumes. Like most(?) people, my resume has also undergone an evolution in style and layout. I would gladly trade whatever I find aesthetically pleasing about mine, if that meant a greater success rate in having my resume read/chosen.
I don't think that kind of data would be useful. It's kind of like asking "what do I have to do to make my song a #1 hit?" It depends entirely on what the mood is of the people who happen to be looking at your resume, and the culture that guides the judgements they make about it. I had spent a good deal of effort building a very simple and pleasing resume using LaTeX, and I ended up having a professional career couns…
>It's kind of like asking "what do I have to do to make my song a #1 hit?"
Sure, but it's also kind of like asking - Given the fact that all these songs are number one, could we extract some common features?
Maybe you'll find out that songs have to be shorter than 3 minutes or nobody plays them on the radio, or that they have to be dynamically compressed within a certain frequency range because most people listen to music on hardware that does not reproduce certain frequencies very well, or that having a weird time signature makes a song unpopular, etc.
>I wouldn't want to work for anybody that trusts people who are too petty or too clueless to make good hiring decisions.
Hah, that would exclude a large portion of the professional software industry !
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#17Using templates with low-level formatting commands defeats the point in LaTeX being about high-level semantic macros. Why not define an \author macro? The YAML input and the input using a well-crafted set of macros would be very similar, to the point where I feel like the OP is really misunderstanding what LaTeX is about.
I think for the invoice YAML makes sense. I would rather use an existing YAML library to generate invoice input files for the pandoc template than generating latex source files directly while sanitizing input for latex special characters.
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#18It would be nice if the website had the corrospinding markdown for comparison.
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#19Using templates with low-level formatting commands defeats the point in LaTeX being about high-level semantic macros. Why not define an \author macro? The YAML input and the input using a well-crafted set of macros would be very similar, to the point where I feel like the OP is really misunderstanding what LaTeX is about.
I think for the invoice YAML makes sense. I would rather use an existing YAML library to generate invoice input files for the pandoc template than generating latex source files directly while sanitizing input for latex special characters.
I think what parent comment was getting at is that you shouldn't be generating LaTeX in the first place. Instead use LaTeX macros to pull the data from the source files. Probably easier said than done.
Re: Show HN: LaTeX Boilerplates – Plain-Text Document Production System
#20Thanks for all the feedback!
Make sure to check out this article where I talk in depth about a typical workflow and the rationale behind this project: