Free online resume creator based on LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Free online resume creator based on LaTeX

cvsintellect.com

82 pointscvsintellect95 comments

This breaks with non-ASCII characters. Hard. The ö in my name becomes "ouml;" – some HTML encoding mangling is present there somewhere which really shouldn't be happening in 2013. There isn't even a reason to even use those entities in HTML. The ß in my street name manages to remove the rest of the street name completely from the output. I'd suggest you should test that data entered on the web site goes through unmangled to LaTeX and then use XeLaTeX to stay clear of Unicode problems (and also for better font support).

Fun facts:

  - ö gets mangled, ö (o and U+0308) results in "o?"
  - ü doesn't get mangled and survives in the PDF for some reason
  - When you return to the page all of ö, ü and ß are replaced by their HTML entities

Date formats could use at least ISO 8601 as well.

You can enter math mode and do fun stuff, but with people not knowing that it's LaTeX underneath this probably just invites fun errors when people use $ to mean $.

I've written my CV in LaTeX 1½ years ago (mostly because I didn't have a good-looking template in Word and was too lazy to build one myself) and I remember that I had to fight hard against moderncv to get it to do the things I wanted. It's not exactly flexible.

I raise my hand to that non-english characters are being changed to ??

sorry for that! :(

Thanks a lot for spending your time listing everything here. means a lot! sorry for the non-ascii bit. we will fix it as soon as possible.

If you need further help with finding such issues, I have at least a little experience in testing encoding/charset/Unicode stuff as well as i18n issues.

That is extremely kind of you! we will try to resolve the issues and get back to you if we need some help there. thanks again!

We got a lot of feedback through our feedback form which sadly is anonymous. Though a lot of them were positive there was one particularly negative feedback. We thought it touched on a lot of important topics and we should respond to it. Since most of the traffic today has been from ycombinator we are putting it here hoping for the person to read. sentences starting with - is feedback recieved while >> is our response.

- Felt compelled to fill in "Personal" section, even though specifying Gender, DOB, Nationality is very unprofessional. Only because it is a section that cannot be removed, and became a Giant Bold "PERSONAL" at the bottom of my resume that was empty -- so if I can't remove it, I guess I better have -something- there ! >> agreed. have listed it as a bug to be fixed in next release! sorry for that.

- so then I fill in some hobbies, at least, and it won't wrap along the margins correctly, as though I shouldn't have so many interesting hobbies for these templates? Looks very bad when everything else does wrap, makes it look shoe-horned. >> agreed. the list of hobbies & languages are supposed to be small. if you need a full fledged hobbies / languages space you can create a custom section for it & list everything there :) as for wrapping. we will try to fix it.

- holding multiple positions and titles in a single company, as many as 4 in 3 years, and 3 in 3 years for the next job, I prefer to list them in descending chronological order under the same section, describing the various 'accomplishments' underneath as opposed to describing 4 different "jobs". - i had to forgoe this information, and instead list all 3 or 4 titles as a single sentance, comma-seperated, which word wraps with a hyphen and looks confusing. I guess I would have to pick my "favorite" title, and stick with it. >> agreed. will brainstorm on how we can fix this. how would you do this in linked-in? it would be another position right? we are asking this as we are trying to keep 1:1 compatibility with linkedin since that data will need to be copied in the same format here.

- No place, really, to list the "business unit" or "department" under which those titles were held. Both the titles and the department are far more telling about the employment history than any bulletpoint can say. - I would also have to add a comma, and a business unit/department, after "Company", if I wanted this information present. I do, it is very vital information, especially in a large corporation like $#!^, where discovering which dept. to contact for verifying employment would be impossible otherwise. >> agreed. we missed location of office & department in positions. will add them soon.

- A number of times 'preview' did not reflect what I had recently saved. I did notice the baloon tip to save the first time I changed templates. I'm very sure I saved it vigorously before preview. Feels like I'm hitting a server farm that isn't replicating quickly enough. >> we are on Google App Engine (GAE) with 3 idle instances & with auto scaling feature of GAE (best in class) this should not have been the case. But we went totally viral today! We will see what we can do about this.

- preferred page breaks on sections are needed, I don't like seeing a single bullet point on the top of page 2 describing something I did at a job on the bottom of page 1. I might be tempted to simply remove an accomplishment to make it break where I'd like! Only to decide against it, or other padding methods, because I decide on a different template or add or remove another line above it. >> agreed. we are brainstorming on pagebreaks & greater control on footers.

- Here I've avoided the privacy invasion of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and all of these other data mining whores, but just to provide you feedback I'm suddenly pushing data through Google anyway. Makes me consider where my data is actually stored -- an AWS cluster, a google app engine database? Now I'm going to have to go back, re-login, and anonymize my data I've provided you. sigh. >> we chose to store data on GAE since it provides the best security that can be provided. Its certainly much more than what a 2 member dev team can provide. as for the data, we promise not to share that data with anyone without your consent. is there anything more we can do in this regard?

- after completing the anonymizing of my information, as account deletion is not possible and it became evident that you do not store my data on servers that you own, and I cannot trust your third party cloud providers, esp. after reading your privacy policy, whoever mysteriously they may be. For this reason I would never store my resume with your service. You must assure me that your servers are physical equipment that you own, in a facility that is owned and operated by a legitimate business with an address and phone number that a human is known to answer now and then, not some lowest-cost cloud provider. >> we are on cloud. (GAE & AWS to be more specific) and we are there not because they are cheap. they do cost quiet some money! we chose them because we think they actually can provide much more security, reliability & performance that a small dev team can with an owned instance of sever & database. we would surely think of having our own server, database etc. when we actually can afford them.

- Nobody likes seeing & in their resume when editing. It looks like it decodes correctly in preview, but why should we have to be confused by it in editing? As software engineer, I feel compelled to correct it each time -- it frightens me that it could become doubly-escaped, becoming && later when I'm not looking, when the & in & gets re-encoded again sometime later, and make me look like a real idiot to a prospective employer. >> agreed. will add that as a bug to be fixed in next release.

- I would not pay for your service: #1: Privacy and #2 Templating issues (described in previous feedback) -- my own resume made in MS Word simply looks much better. >> have a look at some samples made on our site: http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Modern.p... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Leadersh... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Euro.pdf and if you prove us your similar looking template on word doc is better after print we will shutdown the service. period.

- I would recommend your service to others: who don't really care about who has their address, phone number, date of birth stored on some-random-harddisk, and have a very difficult time in MS Word. When I worked as a tutor in a college, I assisted at least 100 students with their resumes each quarter -- you would want to consider advertising in such spaces, though many would be inaccessible by you by their tax-funded nature: Workplace placement programs and libraries, for instance. >> yes students are our first goto market since they would be our early adopters. we are thinking on how we can reach them.

- I would actually pay for your service if you did anything more useful than templating (and the formatting and limitations previously mentioned were resolved). For instance: providing shorthand.com/firstname-lastname URL's for a web version, exporting to .doc, and finishing out the many unfinished concepts already here. >> yes. we know you would not pay for the currently running software online. and thats why its free :) we have premium templates & public resumes in our roadmap. but we are still thinking on a path to choose.

- Your pintrist referral link at the bottom just makes you look like a cheap, cheap, attention-seeking whore. >> yes. sadly we are in attention seeking mode right now & we would not make any balls about it. we have worked on this for a year now & we think it can serve the people for good. we want it to reach as many eyeballs as possible and get as many feedbacks as possible.

Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Hope this reply makes you feel much better about the whole thing :)

personal is no more a mandatory section.

Looks good. My old CV originates at Linkedin labs, which had some nice templates a few years ago. Using LaTeX is a particularly nice touch, because now I can tell recruiters that I really don't have a Word version of my CV.

Yes :) Its a step towards changing the way CVs / Resumes are made!

Coincidentally I was experimenting with LaTeX for writing my resume today, so this caught my eye.

In the screenshots, I see the same problem that I was facing with an [offline tool][1]:

There are too many hyphens all over the place! For example in this screenshot: https://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Classic...

... you can see "Devel-oped" "function-ality" "con-version" "expo-sure" "communi-cations"

Most other word processors can justify text without too much hyphenation. The TeX system seems to work differently (at least by default).

[1] https://github.com/mwhite/resume

Yes. We see your point. Will see if there is an alternative for that. Not sure wether we want to do away with hyphens. They look pretty good. http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Classic.... we will get back to you on this. thanks.

It looks potentially a very good application, however, I'm unable to sign up as I use a personalised domain and get this message:

Incorrect domain of Email-id! (only gmail, yahoo, msn, outlook, rediff, hotmail are supported for now).

Do you have plans to support a greater number of domains soon?

yes. this is basically to stop people from signing up from mailinator kind of email ids. For now you can either use a gmail, yahoo, msn, rediff, hotmail or even do OAuth signin from facebook & linkedin. You can even try without sign-up :)

I have neither of those and this doesn't even include popular providers like gmx oder web.de. This a very bad move.

In that case, you should check against a blacklist instead: http://torvpn.com/temporaryemail.html

Yes. We understand. We are actively thinking of solving the problem. Sorry & Thanks for your time.

No, the problem is that you obviously thought to hard when wilfully introducing the problem and threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Certainly not. You can be assured of that! We have a try without sign-up just for the people who dont want to spend time in sign-ups / dont trust us enough. Its just that when we want to contact you for a genuine reason say send a mailer about a new template thats available we want that to reach you, specially since we spend on the emails being sent! And any list of such temporary emails are not enough to safegaurd us from this problem. But we will most surely re-think on how to solve this problem.

we have removed the restriction of popular email providers only. thank you for your feedback. its helping us get better! and also thank you for the list of temporary email providers, we used it to blacklist domains.

I feel a bit insulted that I can't sign up with my own domain. That's a bad move.

We are sorry about that. That was certainly not the intention though! We will do something about this and get back to you.

This. I use my own domain for all of my email, and don't like to give out my gmail email address. This is a really bad idea, and should be one of your top priorities to be changed. Getting "bad" emails is part of the cost of doing business, so stop hiding behind the "it costs us money to send emails" line. So what?! You are eliminating users by doing this, which in the long run costs you WAY more than sending to some non-existent emails. Just validate the email addresses so you know they exist, and maybe re-check in 30 days - that would probably eliminate most of the "testing" emails from your system.

yes. we realize that we might loose some users just for the sake of not having an email acc wit a popular provider. for some reason we assumed that users would have an acc with one of them and use it or try without signup..we dint think of the users who would want to signup but with an alternate email of theirs. back to drawing rooms on this! :)

[copied from above] we have removed the restriction of popular email providers only. thank you for your feedback. its helping us get better!

and what's wrong with signing up with something like mailinator? i mean, the point is to not give away your "real" email address for a service you cannot yet trust. Whenever a site stops you from signing up via a "throw-away" email, i feel suspicious.

[copied from above comment] Certainly not. You can be assured of that! We have a try without sign-up just for the people who dont want to spend time in sign-ups / dont trust us enough. Its just that when we want to contact you for a genuine reason say send a mailer about a new template thats available we want that to reach you, specially since we spend on the emails being sent!

[copied from above] we have removed the restriction of popular email providers only. thank you for your feedback. its helping us get better!

This gives me a bad feeling. If the "false signup" is SUCH an issue, it makes me speculate that the end goal is to have my details for some other purpose - like passing on to annoying recruitment companies.

we have removed the restriction of popular email providers only. thank you for your feedback. its helping us get better!

I wrote my post University CV in LaTeX using TeXnicCenter/MikTeK because I have used LaTeX for my thesis and I liked the output compared to Word. Then recently I had to rewrite it completely in English and since I had no LaTeX system installed on my computer I tried to used the Europass CV http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/it/documents/curriculum-vi... It is a nice system because you can edit it online, it saves information in your browser so you can continue editing it and you can even reupload the PDF and repopulate the fields (it seems to have additional XML data inside). Unfortunately I resisted just a month using it (I didn't like the spacing/format) and then decided to completely rewrite the CV (this time using Libre Office).

This is interesting, and maybe I'll give it a try, but how are you planning to monetize it?

Thank you for giving it a try :) For the monetizing bit. Frankly we have no idea! we wanted people to LaTeX and make amazing resumes. We are thinking hard on how to keep this going. Premium templates, Paid publicly hosted resumes are some of the ideas we have. Not sure what way we will be treading.

Interesting concept. There are a lot of cv builders on the market, building some high quality premium cv's could be a viable business but getting noticed is quite hard so pushing the LaTeX angle on the site might be a good way to find a niche.

(disclaimer I am the cofounder of sharelatex.com)

Thanks a lot for the feedback :) we have been thinking on how to push it. Its time saving, quality is amazing. We want to leverage LaTeX usage but people outside academia are not very aware of it. But we will rethink about it!

drop me a support email on the site and we can have a chat, there are a few interesting things we could talk about.

sure :) Thanks a lot.

What about markdown? As long as the service is new, I would be scared of having my CV depended on your app. Yes, I know LaTeX, I also know it's a pain to set up if you are applying "non standard" formatting.

By the way, I don't know where are you from, but this tool looks cool enough for Nordic countries. In particular, you could target easily carrier centers in Danish universities (http://bss.au.dk/knowledge-exchange/career-centre/). These centers offer free advice for students' CV. I see this service being advised or even used there (like the students upload his CV on the system and gets help virtually).

My CV is based off of this project:

http://mwhite.github.io/resume/

I write it in Markdown, and then build it into both a PDF and HTML. Then I use Github Pages to publish both with a simple push.

+1 for this project. It helped me get my first tech job.

We preffered LaTeX because of its stunning results. You should look at sample resume we created http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Modern.p... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Leadersh... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Euro.pdf

This project converts Markdown to LaTeX to PDF.

oops sorry for the premature reply. too much hap in a day :( a wysiwyg / rte is something we worked hard towards since that was the most easiest way to fill in data. we will have a closer look at it and get back.

Thanks a lot for the pointers :) we will try to see if Danish universities would be interested in us. And for being dependent on the app. Yes you will have to depend on us for the awesome templates we will provide and you will not feel bad about being dependent! ;)

We have added "powered by LaTeX" on home page. Thanks for pointing that out.

That's one good looking website. And you can skip all registrations, go straight for the meat, which is also great. Are those templates all your own design?

Unfortunately, the preview doesn't work for me. Do you have some problems or is it a matter of only half-filling the form?

BTW What's "Pincode" in the contacts section? Zip/postal code?

EDIT: No, got it. You need to click save on each section. Unfortunately it doesn't handle non-ascii characters.

Yes. Clicking on the save is not very evident. While once you know that you need to click on save that info is redundant and hence we have kept it hidden when you are not on the form. We are thinking of ways of making it more evident the first time. For the non-ascii bit. We are in beta (just a month being public). We are working on making it perfect! :)

Here is the summary: 1. handle non-ascii characters 2. check if we can do something about hyphens 3. try and make tex script downloadable 4. make click of save after data entry evident the first time 5. personal should not be a mandatory section 6. make delete of objective intuitive 7. fix date format display on UI 8. add latex packages in credits page (sorry missed that :-/) Please feel free to add if we missed something... Keep em comin! :)

7 & 8 is fixed and is online.

'Date Display Type' under 'Settings' should have consistent sample date:

10/2/2013 [Numeric]

10/Dec/2013 [Short Month]

10/December/2013 [Long Month]

Probably there's a typo in first sample. Also DD > 12 helps unambiguously identify DD from MM.

amazing eye for detail. that baffled evrybody in the team! :) thanks for pointing that out..will fix asap

fixed! :)

Additionally, the second and third "date display type" are not common at all (to the point that they seem made-up). For common date formats check CLDR data: http://st.unicode.org/cldr-apps/v#/en/Gregorian/562f98c4c6b2...

Obviously, date formats are different for each locale; en-US: MM/DD/YYYY, en-GB: DD/MM/YYYY, de-DE: DD.MM.YYYY.

yes. we realize that. currently you can configure it to DD/MM/YYYY, DD/MMM/YYYY, DD/<full month>/YYYY & choose to compute durations between dates. we will give more configurations soon. thank you for your time.

Why would I not use this in place of ShareLatex?

https://www.sharelatex.com/user/subscription/plans

I know this is focused on a specific domain, but you have serious competition with these dudes.

1) We are in a specific domain and understand the problems better 2) You dont need to know LaTeX to use our site. 3) LaTeX is code you will need to maintain it while here its just data that needs to be updated. 4) Changing template in LaTeX can be hard, its a re-write, here it would be 2-3 clicks 5) we will introduce custom templates which you will not find anywhere :)

Very similar to this one: http://cvmadeeasy.com Pro: no need to register, you can re-upload your CV later on to modify it. Con: there is only one template, for the moment.

And the design is inspired from moderncv, a great LaTeX package :)

nice indeed :) all the best! when you say inspired its not LaTeX underneath?

Thanks :)

At first it was using LaTeX to produce the PDF, but now it is just HTML/CSS templating, and the pdf rendering is done using wkhtmltopdf.

Actually, handling special characters was one of the reasons to switch to HTML.

oh ok. We will try to stick with LaTeX :)

Something's wrong with the fonts. Anything I bash out using the "Classic" template comes out typeset in Computer Modern, rather than Century Gothic as outlined in the example.

Any chance to make an option to download the LaTeX code for manual tailoring?

Just dropin a mail (through contact us) requesting for the Tex script. We will be happy to provide it :)

Have a look at some of our awesome templates

…which use hyphen in date ranges

I guess not even LaTeX users can be expected to have any form of typographical training. After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything automagically far better than you could do on your own ;-)

After all, they usually tell you that LaTeX handles everything automagically far better than you could do on your own ;-)

I got bit by propaganda too last year.

I am a little nervous at the moment because I am picking up latex again in some weeks after months of not using it and I wonder what has changed and what I have forgotten since then.

Go for it! You would not repent it for sure :)

what's better to use?

en-dash

Thank you for that. Will look into it and get back to you. We are just starting out. Sorry for any short comings :)

How different is this from the existing options like Resumonk? [0]

[0] http://www.resumonk.com/resume_templates

We haven't come across anyone who uses LaTeX for creating your resume and is free. And why is LaTeX so special? Here are a few reasons: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

I know the significance of LaTex as I use it regularly for my work. I am not sure what something Resumonk uses - doesn't look like LaTex. Great, so LaTex seems to be the niché.

Have you seen templates hosted at "LaTex Templates"? [0] I would be curious to know if you're using them or plan to use them in the future.

[0] http://www.latextemplates.com/

Yes they usually use HTML and then convert it to PDF. This leads to a lot of problems in alignment etc & the print quality is also not great. And for the LaTeX templates. We are currently using existing templates. We plan to allow create custom templates soon :)

Nice work!

Suggestion: A lot of requests going to the server when creating a resume. Use local storage for storing the data and send it to the server once when user clicks the save button.

We are thinking of local storage. There were multiple challenges related to it. Sending all data at once would make save slower. and when you save some small change a lot of data would have to be resaved at once. By splitting the data save into chunks we thought would give best performance - user experience balance. We will rethink on this and get back to you. thank you for your time :)

There is overhead for every request, one large request is generally faster than several small ones of the same size.

You have to be smart to send the data that is changed or client side compression is another option.

by chunking data to be saved we dont have to send all the data at all. so when you are saving personal info your position related data is not sent to server. but we send all personal related data again to save. this we thought reduced lot of complexity on the backend and gave best user experience by reducing number of clicks for saving data.

Great tool for academics! Cool that you can add special sections like patents.

(disclosure: we are building a tool for researchers to write better papers: bohr.launchrock.com)

Amazing :) you should have a look at our credits page https://www.cvsintellect.com/public/page/credits on what we used to build this tool. You can ask for any further information which we will try our best to provide them! :)

Some insights on how to make a good resume: http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html

Thank you for the post. we will have a look at it and get back. we have tried to incorporate as many professional cv "rules" as we could.

Any chance of opensourcing this? This could be great as a tool for teams that participate in tenders that have common projects (link against project database).

We are thinking about this. We want to open-source most of the stuff but not the security related code. Infact we have started an open-source project to teach our learning from the project http://cvsintellect.tumblr.com/post/57157924548/open-source-.... We will think a bit more on this and get back to you. Thanks for your interest.

The template previews don't work for me: if I click on a template picture, I get a preview image of about the same size as the thumbnail I clicked on.

we have added a link to pdf on the home page now. thanks for pointing it out.

How to I delete Objectives section? I am in 'Manage Sections' but how do I delete it?

just dont fill anything in that section it wont appear on your resume! :)

'Remove Custom Section' - So Objective is not custom section. Hmmm.

yes. we will remember to make it more intuitive. Thank you for your interest!

This is very good, but there does not seem to be any way to download the tex script?

[copied from below post] just create your resume and drop in a mail through contact us and we will send you the tex script :)

Sure, but consider adding a feature to download the tex script.

surely! thank you for your time :)

Great app! Is it possible to have the LaTeX code generated ?

yes as we mentioned in one of our above comments just create your resume and drop in a mail through contact us and we will send you the tex script.

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