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Comment by zeugma | Hacker News Reader

The goal of LaTeX is to output a printable document, most of the time a pdf. I don't think sending the sources is polite nor very readable nevermind HR-compliant.

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Fair point. What do you do with a situation where the person receiving the LaTeX CV has never heard of LaTeX though?

I always sent a PDF file. You can only see that is was made by LaTeX with a trained eye(if their is not too heavy customization) or in the PDF meta-data. Designers would use pre-print tool like inDesign, which output PDF too.

PDF document is a problem with big companies portal that only want word document. I tried a few doc converter but they are not Free (as in beer and Freedom) and the result is of course really inferior. Nowadays, I would try html conversion as I think the result can be quite good and readable by most people (even without pdf reader).

Also, always have a hard copy of your CV for the interview. Once, the corporate website of a company I applied accepted pdf files, but butchered them via pdf2txt or something like that. Having the right layout to show them saved the day.

They won't even know it is a LaTeX CV, to them it will just be another PDF, except a bit better looking.

I think you're confused, or just not familiar with LaTeX. Have you, as a recruiter, ever come across a resume/CV submitted as LaTeX source? I find it hard to believe someone who bothered to lay out their resume/CV in LaTeX could make the mistake of NOT compiling it to a PDF first.

edit

This is what the output of something like pdflatex would look like: http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

LaTeX source would be plain text files that look like: https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/examples/l3...

I should have clarified. I am familiar with LaTeX but I don't see the point in submitting a LaTeX resume if the person receiving it hasn't got a clue what LaTeX is and thinks it's just another albeit prettier PDF document. Seems like a waste of effort.

For me, LaTeX is the simplest way to make a decent-looking PDF with minimal fuss. It's no more work than putting up an HTML CV.

I agree with the other commenter, using LaTeX has nothing to do with impressing the reader with my (shallow) LaTeX skills, and everything to do with not having to deal with something like InDesign or whatever other painful WYSIWYG tool most people use for this kind of thing.

It's generally easier to manage a proper resume tailored to each company with a well-structured LaTeX file than with Word. If you want to specifically draw attention to the fact, just toss \LaTeX into skills, though, honestly, most of us familiar with LaTEx can recognise a lot of distinguishing characteristics that few people bother to change.

If the person receiving the resume doesn't know what LaTeX is, they still have a relatively portable format and you expended less effort getting it to them. Win/Win.

I normally send both the LaTeX source as well as a PDF.

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