Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Writing a resume using reStructuredText

reStructuredText (rst) is a simple markup language perfect for writing documentation. Altough it may not be as powerful as Latex, it is much simpler to use.

I decided to give a try at using rst to create my resume : here is the input file.

Now, thanks to this rst to pdf converter project (written in my favourite language), I can easily generate a nice pdf version of my resume. Here is the resulting pdf.

This approach has many advantages compared to my previous way of doing (using open office). I can easily update the document, change the style, and generate my resume not only in pdf, but also in html or almost any formats I want.

[edit] : as some people pointed out, the input file for my CV needs an extra file for the style. This file can be found here.

8 comments:

Pax Fabrica said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ralsina said...

Cool, seeing people use rst2pdf always makes me happy :-)

Nahuel said...

Great, I've used rst2pdf for slides at work. It's good to find I don't need LaTeX for a slick CV anymore :)

Jonathan said...

Could you post the style file 'cv.pdfstyle' that you use?

Guillaume Chéreau said...

Jonathan : I added a link to the style file.

sarcastic241 said...

At last! I found a good post like this.. Thanks for this informative post! By the way, can you write a post about facebook seo importance? Thanks again!

b0rsuk said...

Unfortunately, the stylesheet no longer works in rst2pdf 0.16-2. This is an unpleasant surprise to me because I've been relying on it, now I may have to rework my CV using some other tool.

The error I'm getting:
rst2pdf -s CV.pdfstyle CV_en.txt -o CV_en.pdf

[WARNING] styles.py:455 title_reference is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias title-reference
[WARNING] styles.py:455 bullet_list is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias bullet-list
[WARNING] styles.py:455 bullet_list_item is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias bullet-list-item
[WARNING] styles.py:455 item_list is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias item-list
[WARNING] styles.py:455 item_list_item is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias item-list-item
[WARNING] styles.py:455 definition_list_term is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias definition-list-term
[WARNING] styles.py:455 definition_list_classifier is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias definition-list-classifier
[WARNING] styles.py:455 field_list is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias field-list
[WARNING] styles.py:455 option_list is an invalid docutils class name, adding alias option-list
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/rst2pdf", line 9, in
load_entry_point('rst2pdf==0.16', 'console_scripts', 'rst2pdf')()
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/rst2pdf/createpdf.py", line 1452, in main
numbered_links=options.numbered_links,
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/rst2pdf/createpdf.py", line 201, in __init__
self.loadStyles(stylesheets)
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/rst2pdf/createpdf.py", line 298, in loadStyles
def_dpi=self.def_dpi)
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/rst2pdf/styles.py", line 520, in __init__
self.StyleSheet.add(ParagraphStyle(**s))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/reportlab/lib/styles.py", line 178, in add
raise KeyError("Style '%s' already defined in stylesheet" % key)
KeyError: "Style 'title-reference' already defined in stylesheet"

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing your cv!

rst2pdf changed some "_" to "-"
a updated style file can be found here:
https://gist.github.com/4413746
best