Maintaining a CV in Multiple Formats

cv pandoc geekery

Suppose you want to keep a CV accessible in PDF, html, and perhaps other formats (e.g. docx). It’s a pain to do them all individually and keep them in sync. Here’s one way to avoid that issue, though it has a bit of initial work involved in setting everything up. What you want to do is keep your CV (or really anything of that ilk that you want to have available in multiple formats) in a YAML file and then use pandoc to convert the YAML file into whatever documents you need. I got the idea from looking at this template on Github.

What you want to do is keep the CV info in a YAML file like so:

name: Immanuel Kant
address: Königsberg, Prussia
email: manny@copernicanrevolution.edu

AOS:
- Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy

AOC:
- German Idealism, Philosophy of Religion

experience:
- years: 1770-1804
  employer: University of Königsberg
  job: Chair of Logic and Metaphysics
  city: Königsberg, DE

Using pandoc, you can then convert this into a variety of formats, including HTML and PDF. The key is to create a template for every output format that you need. For example, you might template your employment history like so:

$for(experience)$
  $experience.years$\\
  \textsc{$experience.employer$}\\
  \emph{$experience.job$}\\
  $experience.city$\\[.2cm]
$endfor$

Pandoc then feeds the YAML info to LaTeX for PDF typesetting. You can see a sample here.

With this method, you can keep your entire CV in a single YAML file and easily generate a PDF, HTML, or some other format. For the full set of templates for LaTeX and HTML, along with a makefile for easy conversion, you can look at my repo on Github.

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