aaron evans

I’ve let my resume stagnate since I got my last job and started SlipperySoft so I thought it would be a good exercise to update my resume with all my new experience. A real problem with writing a resume is figuring out which program to use to write it. Once upon a time, I used Microsoft Word to create my resume. I was in college and at the time, the employers that I was sending resumes to used Word and it worked pretty well: i could create my resume on the Mac and save it as a pdf if I needed to send it somewhere that didn’t like Word docs. During graduate school, I became fluent in LaTeX and decided that my resume should be written in LaTeX. The idea was that I could use LaTeX and create pdfs or html using latex2html. Seemed like a great idea until I realized that the pdfs may look nice but the html didn’t. Even worse, if someone wanted a plain text version of the resume, the process of extracting plain text out of latex was painful. Toward the end of my graduate school career, I wrote my resume exclusively in html because anybody can read html and if you have to, you can export an html document to pdf. This proved undesirable because the appearance of a document formatted using html is inconsistent across platforms and html isn’t really intended to be formatted for print: there’s no easy way to determine if your pdf resume fits on one page when you see it in a web browser. This time around I decided to use Apple’s Pages word processor. I’m not using the newest version but I think it’s pretty much the same thing that they ship today. I was really interested in seeing how well Pages could export to different formats. PDF output is obviously what I see in Pages. Here’s a look at how the other formats appeared upon export: Word, RTF, plain text, and html. The Word export and the RTF output worked pretty nicely but the html and plain text leave something to be desired. I also don’t like that generated html is so ugly to look at. Why does every line of text have to have a declared font of “Optima”. Isn’t it obvious that all my content is written in Optima and can’t that be defined in the stylesheet?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Apple, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.