Manage Your Resume With Markdown

Based on Mike White's resume.

Overview

A collection of files and scripts to manage your resume in the Markdown lightweight text markup language. Write your resume as a specially formatted text file and produce PDF and HTML versions easily.

This started with a tex header file and build script. I've modified it to use a Makefile and a XeTeX template.

I switched to XeTeX so I could specify better fonts than the defaults that LaTeX generates.

Requirements

I run all of this on a mac although it should work fine under Linux too. Required packages:

• Emacs
  • Just kidding. You don't need emacs to use this but it is pretty awesome.
  • Markdown-mode - the best way to edit Markdown files with Emacs.
• Pandoc - convert Markdown files to various formats such as HTML and PDF.
  • Install on your Mac via Macports.
• TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX - required for Pandoc to create PDFs.
  • Install with Macports.
• Perl
  • The best scripting language ever written.
  • Required by the resume-uploader script.
  • You also need File::Homedir, install with sudo cpan "File::HomeDir"
• Awesomeness
  • You bring this yourself, not available prepackaged.

Usage

Run make in the resume directory. This builds html and pdf versions of my resume. It also invokes resume-uploader to upload the various files to my website.

resume-uploader is a fairly generic perl script that uses Net::FTP to upload the files. It checks if the files on the server are older than the ones being uploaded and only uploads newer files. It also only uploads files which already exists on the server.

There are just a couple of config settings in the uploader script - change them as appropriate for your setup. That script should work with just about any ftp server.

Note that resume-uploader assumes the use of a ~/.netrc file to store your login info. The format of this file is:

machine www.example.com login username password XXXXXXXX
default login anonymous password user@site

Your ~/.netrc must be mode 600.

I call my finished files resume-phil.xxx to fit an existing naming scheme. You probably want to adjust the makefile and scripts to call them something else.

TODO

It would be pretty amazing if someone figured out how to generate word documents from Markdown. Maybe use pandoc to create RTF?

Conclusion

This setup works very well for my needs and collects a number of scattered bits of info about markdown and pandoc resume generation. Thanks especially to the inspiration of Mike White's resume which showed me this all was actually possible.