Hacker News Reader

Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

While the first item in their "Why LaTeX?" list is "Separates content from formatting/styling", I would say that my biggest problems with Latex is it doesn't actually separates content from formatting/styling. While there is a limited support for something almost akin to a stylesheet, in practice for the user, changing the style of something inevitably means changing the macro you call on your content instead of changing the style elsewhere. Latex was maybe the best tool in the 80s, but since the 90s or 00s XML/HTML/SGML/... are much better alternatives, with actual separation of content from formatting/styling.

View on HN

Yeah I hate to agree with this because while I love the idea of LaTeX--yep, it doesn't separate content and style. You get markup all over the place and it's often cryptic as hell. My resume is in LaTeX and I hate editing it because I'm always afraid the styling is going to break in some subtle way and then I have to figure out exactly what went wrong.

I agree with the sentiment. You can make stylesheets for LaTeX, without changing the macros you call in your content, but it’s a somewhat arcane process. Go on the TeX Stack Exchange site and someone will explain how to do it if you want. I don’t need that. ConTeXt is better at this.

I’ve been doing my résumé in ConTeXt. Seems like it’s more expected in ConTeXt that you mess with the styling.

  \reshdr{Software Engineer, Yoyodyne}
  \ressub{November 1981--June 1984}
  \startresdesc
    Made a million widgets.
  \stopresdesc

It’s reasonably common & expected in ConTeXt to define your own macros for custom sections or whatever you need. ConTeXt has macros to define macros…

  \definehead[reshdr][subsection]
  \setuphead[reshdr][textstyle=\bfx,number=no,before=\vskip 1em,after={},align={flushleft,nothyphenated}]

The style is never entirely separate. Putting a class "side-image", "inline-image" or "centered-image" is a styling choice. Sure you put a lot of the detailing stuff in the css, but you can as well trivially define your own macro in Latex to separate most of the gnarly stuff, or define your own style. If you don't want to be able to control precisely individual elements, then there's only semantic markup left. I would say the main difference between the two is that in Latex it requires slightly more knowledge to use good practices. In html there's no difficulty difference between good and bad practices, but there's nothing to enforce good practices either.

That's why proponents of "semantic css" (RIP) would have said the correct classes would have been "secondary-image" or "main-image" or "accent-image" or something like that, with the stylesheet deciding if if "secondary-image" should be at the side, alternating, or whatever.

Yeah I came here to say this as well. I gave up on LaTeX for my resume something like ten years ago. Since then I use HTML/CSS and render it with wkhtmltopdf.

edit: grammar

Same here except these days I just use the print to pdf feature in Chrome.

While HTML and other markup languages are great, I wonder if there is a way to use a word processor while creating the document - focusing only on content (spellcheck, etc.) and not on formatting or on syntax. Then, a context specific converter (that is specific to the type of content - a resume, a newsletter, a FAQ page, etc.) takes care of adding the formatting and publishing it.

As an example, recently, I had to create a bunch of FAQ pages, and I created a tool like [1]. While Pandoc can be used, I still need to worry about (at least basic) formatting the doc while typing it out in the word processor to make it look good in the HTML output.

[1] https://github.com/abhishekbasu/faq2html

Have you heard of Quarto?

Completely separating styling from content seems dogmatic in this context. It certainly makes sense when working with long documents with standardized style, or ones that need to be processed with code, but I don't think that really applies. From what I understand, even ATS resume processing is a blunt instrument that assumes the content will be commonly formatted word docs or PDFs, and sending it better quality data will not yield better quality results. I think defining styles in an OO.org document would suit the task much better. Different strokes for different folks and all that, but this seems like a hammer thinking everything looks like a nail.

In my experience, HTML+CSS is better in every way except page breaks. If they added more pagination-related features, it'd be better in every way. It's been too long since I played with it, but I remember tons of weird issues, like images being at the bottom of one page and the caption being on the top of the next, etc.

Additionally, CSS really needs way to say "when text overflows from this container, put it in this other container". With that, it could replace Indesign for me.

That said the rate of improvement with CSS is really great. :has() alone is super powerful. I also love color-contrast().

There is a draft for the CSS spec to allow this, the CSS Regions Module: https://caniuse.com/css-regions

However, it seems to have been abandoned.

Use LaTeX because if the hiring manager has a PhD they'll instantly recognize res.cls and put you at the top of the pile

That's a bit too much of a blanket statement. Latex isn't special. Everyone I know has used it, 100% of them have struggled with margins and fonts and images and equations needing to be rewritten three times and so on. I would not find a Latex resume even remotely novel or interesting. I certainly wouldn't downplay it, but Latex isn't instant-streetcred either.

Yeah. Using it for your CV is a costly signal that you’re the kind of academic type who writes enough math to only find LaTeX comfortable.

If writing math is not what the job that you’re applying to is looking for in you, you should probably only use LaTeX for your own enjoyment.

Indeed it does not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com