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Comment by basicallydan | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person in this thread who doesn't think that the structured nature of a CV isn't necessarily super important? Having a readable, well laid-out and well-written CV can be vital in deciding whether someone is worth contacting or not.

I love putting "structured data" in formats like JSON as much as the next guy, but sometimes that approach misses the point a little bit IMO.

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I think it is a lot easier to manage the content in your resume by keeping it in a structured document such as TeX or Markdown. If you manage your resume in a word document it gets messy, plus if you use markdown or TeX you can use Version Control to track or rollback the changes you've made to your resume... its very useful.

Agreed. I feel that presentation nuances in your printed or PDF resume are important.

For example, how does this structured approach ensure that everything fits neatly on one page?

You and parent raise fair points, but I think this approach is a good compromise between the structure that you get from markdown and the aesthetics that ConTeXt is able to achieve.

To expand on your point, it's true that this approach does not automatically fit a given amount of content neatly into N pages, but I don't think there exists a system that can; you'll always have to iterate on what exactly to include if you want to have exactly N fully filled pages, regardless of your document processing workflow.

I believe there is a medium between the two. Keep your data structured, then when you're satisfied with the content, paste it into in-design and work on the layout.

They also help you focus on the content of the resume, which is really what the bottom line is anyways. I to find them impersonal and boring though, I have spent way too much time building resumes _to–order_ and have even submitted some mistakes.

Focusing on a model for your resume is kind of a helpful developmental tool itself imo.

Too bad this sort of thing will not ever catch on, or standardize. Either way it is very useful for me personally.

Not sure if you're referring to my approach or the other possible approaches mentioned in this thread, but is there anything specifically about the generated pdf that you would describe as badly laid out?

The approach in my post was specifically trying to be a more flexible format than the recently featured JSON resume, while giving ConTeXt as much freedom as possible in laying out the pdf.

Haha, no, I'm actually supporting your method. I was responding broadly to the general feeling I'm getting from the thread of "JSON is better than Markdown for a raw CV format".

I wouldn't think so, I considered a few options when I last overhauled my CV and ended up just using Word (exported as PDF).

I dunno maybe I'm lazy because I don't generate from LaTeX or Markdown or JSON or whatever but I feel that nobody reading your CV really cares as long as you present the information in a concise and clear way.

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