reStructuredText Resume

I've had a resume in active maintenance since the mid 90s, and it's gone through many iterations. I started with a Word document (I didn't know any better). In the late 90s I moved to parallel Word, text, and HTML versions, all maintained separately, which drifted out of sync horribly. In 2010 I redid it in Google Docs using a template I found whose HTML hinted at a previous life in Word for OS X. That template had all sorts of class and style stuff in it that Google Docs couldn't actually edit/create, so I was back to hand-editing HTML and then using Google Docs to create a PDF version. I still had to keep the text version current separately, but at least I'd decided I didn't want any job that wanted a Word version.

When I decided to finally add my current job to my resume, even months after starting, I went for another overhaul. The goal was to have a single input file whose output provided HTML, text, and PDF representations. As I saw it that made the options: LaTeX, reStructuredText, or HTML.

I started down the road with LaTeX, and found some great templates, articles, and prior examples, but it felt like I was fighting with the tool to get acceptable output, and nothing was coming together on the plain text renderer front.

Next I turned to reStructuredText, and found it yielded a workable system. I started with Guillaume ChéreAu's blog post and template and used the regular docutils tool rst2html to generate the HTML versions. The normal route for turning reStructuredText into PDF using doctools passes through LaTeX, but I didn't want to go that route, so I used rst2pdf, which gets there directly. I counted the reStructuredText version as close-enough to text for that format.

Since now I was dealing entirely with a source file that compiled to generated outputs it only made sense to use a Makefile and keep everything in a Mercurial repository. That gives me the ability to easily track changes and to merge across multiple versions (different objectives) should the need arise. With the Makefile and Mercurial in place I was able to add an automated version string/link to the resume so I can tell from a print out which version someone lis looking at. Since I've always used a source control repository for the HTML version it's possible to compare revisions back to 2001, which get pretty silly.

I'm also proud to say that the URL for my resume hasn't changed since 1996, so any printed version ever includes a link to the most current one. Here are links to each of those formats: HTML, PDF, text, and repository, where the text version is the one from which the others are created.