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Friday, January 18, 2013

GitHub + Markdown - a Great Combination for CVs

A while ago there was a popular topic about how to create a CV in LaTeX. Naturally I gave it a go. The resulting PDF looked just fine and I was quite happy with the results.

Today I wanted to convert my LaTeX into HTML so that I could host the CV easily. Sure the PDF can be hosted but it's not that nice to use in many cases. Besides you can convert your HTML into PDF simply by printing it.

Initially I thought this should be something that is very easy to do. Unfortunately pandoc appears to be broken at MacPorts currently. And I really didn't feel like fiddling with it so I decided to do something different.

I've always like Markdown as a format. So why not to use that and generate the HTML based on that? I took a good look at my PDF generated based on LaTeX and more or less replicated the results. While at it I came up with a custom addition to the language so that I could use definition lists. The basic syntax is very simple. It looks something like this: * Lion -- Lion is a big cat-like animal.

You can see my results at GitHub. Be sure to check out the resulting CV as well. I know it's far from the best CV in the world and probably could use some extra styling. But you have to start from somewhere. :)