My “Law of Coders-Writing-Dissertations”: If a coder starts writing a dissertation, pretty soon they will end up trying all the existing solutions to write the dissertation in Markdown and convert it to perfectly-typeset $\LaTeX$ . When existing tools the coder slightly dissatisfied, they will invent a new bespoke method of doing this task. Eventually, the dissertation might get written…
I think I have to extend that to include CVs (résumés) as well: I keep wishing for a way to easily track all the information necessary to build my CV in one declarative form, then generate any “view” of the CV I want quickly. In other words, if I want PDF, or Word, or Markdown, it should be easy and scriptable. Turns out, there are several different ways of maybe doing this. Coders seem to run into this problem, evaluate the alternatives, then make their own solution anyway. And so have I.
I really like the idea of HackMyResume… Quite honestly, I think I like it enough to try to adapt my process to use it (because why ever leave “good enough” alone?). But, I really wanted to use YAML (or maybe TOML) as my definition language since it is more editor-friendly than JSON, and I wanted to use pandoc to convert to different output types.
Here’s what I settled on.
First, I entered all of the information I wanted into a YAML format. I had already started down this road at some previous point in the past when I started (and abandoned) this quest, so it was convenient just to bring the YAML file up-to-date. I found that converting from YAML to JSON is easy with the remarshal tool. Then, I want to build my master “view” in Markdown, which Pandoc can convert into Word, HTML, PDF, or lots of other things. To turn the data into Markdown, I decided just to use the well-known Mustache js tool — I build a template that shows how I want to format and layout all the info, then I let Mustache do it. But since Mustache wants JSON-formatted item declarations, so I use remarshal to convert YAML-to-JSON, then Mustache to create the Markdown file the pandoc to change to other output formats.
This all seems like a lot of parts, but actually it is very simple to orchestrate with a Makefile. And since the declarative “data source” YAML is plain-text and the “master” view Markdown file is plain-text (as is the Mustache template) — it is dead simple to source control the whole thing in git.
In summary, here is the workflow:
- Define CV information in YAML format.
- Hint for “Simple” bibliographic info: Export in “CSL-YAML” format from your reference manager (I use Zotero). (Or, export in “CSL-JSON then use
remarshalto convert to YAML”).
- Hint for “Simple” bibliographic info: Export in “CSL-YAML” format from your reference manager (I use Zotero). (Or, export in “CSL-JSON then use
- Prepare template:
- Create a Mustache template that will match the Markdown output format you want, given the data you define in your YAML.
- Build Markdown:
- Convert YAML database to JSON with
remarshal. - Convert JSON database + Mustache template to Markdown with
mustache.
- Convert YAML database to JSON with
- Build other formats (like Word) using
pandoc.
If you have cv.yaml and cv.mustache, it could be as simple as:
remarshal -i cv.yaml --of json | mustache - cv.mustache cv.md
pandoc -f markdown -t docx -i cv.md -o cv.docx
Now you can start getting fancy with Pandoc templates to make the Word / PDF / etc. versions look “just right”. Enjoy!