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Comment by purplezooey | Hacker News Reader

The other day I saw a resume written in LaTeX. Sorry, that's the height of pretension.

Why? LaTeX is good at what it does, and there are predefined templates for high quality resumes in various layouts (for example see [1] and [2]). I've written more using LaTeX than Word, so it's easier for me (and others I presume) to produce good results for out of the ordinary documents, like a resume, in LaTeX.

[1] https://www.rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv

The problem is many employers and headhunters demand MS Word. As a professional resume writer, I love the output of LaTeX which I use with rmarkdown and want to offer a cheap, easy way for DIYers to do their own. Inevitably, I will be asked to convert to the Word version. Still haven't gotten a good styles.docx file setup to do that.

My resume has been in LaTeX (now XeLaTeX) for many years now for my own convenience (separation of format from content) not pretention. Given that I distribute PDFs, I fail to see how its source format is relevant or even visible - not using Computer Modern fonts.

I didn't downvote - there is a substantial number of pretenders in this space. Because latex is surprisingly easy to use. But I keep my resume in the same family of software myself and it's because of ease of editing. I hide the Computer Modern font and use popular Microsoft Office fonts. So nobody knows.

Why? LaTeX is great for typesetting, and let's you focus on the content rather than the formatting. Perfect for resumes really.

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