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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see a really good LaTeX CV. I guess it is possible but in my experience LaTeX just isn't designed for that and gives boring-looking results.

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A CV created with plain boring LaTeX is perfect for the right audience: people who can identify a LaTeX document at first sight.

I have yet to see an impressive resume from someone that wasn't boring in layout. Worse, I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate. :(

> I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate

I have seen many. You might be misinterpreting "boring". I don't mean that CVs should be like a Flash website. I mean they should look good typographically and not just like an instruction manual for a washing machine.

I wish I'd saved some of the best ones, but take a look at some of these: https://www.beamjobs.com/resumes/programmer-resume-examples

Ignoring the content, they are almost all far superior typographically to the example in this article.

I'm somewhat cheating in what I mean here, though. I was thinking of stuff like https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html, where his CV is so basic in layout that it is kind of shocking. If I remember the CV of most high level faculty I got the chance to look at, none of them were that concerned with columns or typeface. They were, simply, lists of data.

It's a bit different in academia, especially if you are Donald Knuth! When do you think was the last time he sent a CV to a company looking for a job? The 60s?

Again, I know I'm cheating to pull his out. I don't have any links to any of the profs I worked near in the past.

I have grown rather convinced more people just go by whatever is in LinkedIn than I'm comfortable with.

I agree that most LaTeX CVs are kind of boring. But I think they are more interesting than the end product in TFA, which I found completely underwhelming.

Now I have spent quite a lot of time customizing LaTeX, to the point where people have come to ask how I produced certain documents, because it surely could not be LaTeX. If you have a specific design idea in your head, LaTeX is able to achieve it if you just spend enough time RTFMing.

> But I think they are more interesting than the end product in TFA, which I found completely underwhelming.

I agree, that's a quite bad CV layout wise. Like someone has said "must be no more than 2 pages!" and his solution is just to eliminate all spacing.

It's nothing to do with LaTeX. Anything you can make in Word you could make in LaTeX.

Anything you can make in Word you can theoretically make in LaTeX with a ton of work that people who make LaTeX CVs don't both to do.

This is like saying "anything you can make in Photoshop you can make in Paint".

I don't think the difference is that great. More like Paint.net.

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