[gnok]

HTML+CSS would provide a fantastic way to view a resume on a web page. However, a resume is more usually forwarded around multiple times via email and then finally printed for a review.

HTML+CSS offers little to no control of how a page would look like once its printed. LaTeX on the other hand, can be optimized with printable fonts, appropriate margins and such like. A PDF with embedded fonts would guarantee that the page would look the same, printed with any computer/OS/printer combination.

[buu700]

What makes you say that? Mine is HTML/CSS -- http://buu700.com/cv.pdf -- and it seems to be pretty consistent. If anything, I would argue that the fine-grained formatting control you can get with HTML/CSS is basically unsurpassed, especially with rendering tools like wkhtmltopdf available.

[dfc]

"I would argue that the fine-grained formatting control you can get with HTML/CSS is basically unsurpassed, especially with rendering tools like wkhtmltopdf available."

Best April Fools Day joke ever...

[buu700]

Okay, I'll bite. What can you not easily do (which one would reasonably do in a resume/CV) in terms of formatting, layout, typography, and so on using HTML/CSS(/Bootstrap?)/wkhtmltopdf?

[dfc]

The joke is less funny when you change the punchline and restrict it to resumes only but its still pretty funny.

Typography? Seriously? In the context of a resume I would gloss over typography but you mentioned it explicitly. Html/css does not play on the same level as text when it comes to kerning, ligatures, letter spacing, expansion/protrusion, etc. Can you do any of the things microtype does with CSS? Searching the issues of wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts. All of these are no brainers with latex. Wkhtmlpdf does not like negative letter spacing! That's something that my mom does with ms word to squeeze a little more text somewhere without a new line or margin change / page break. How does css/html handle the period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence? Multilingual resumes with different spacing requirements for different languages? Ie what is html/css method for \frenchspacing? Does html/css provide language aware layout decisions like babel/pollyglossia? Line breaking and hyphenation are notoriously horrible with html/css.

Can you easily reference your bibtex CV and include a list of your publications in html/css? A list of publications is a must for academic/research jobs. Can you easily change the reference format if you decide to pivot to a new industry that expects a different style than your previous industry?

Easily compute lengths of strings on the fly to use a consistent indent? Ie so that your city column consistently shows up in the same place after you include a new job with a date string that is longer than previous jobs. One of the default cv packages on CTAN can draw lines of different lengths depending on how long you were in a position. How do you do date calculations in html/css? Can you then take the length of date and do calculations relative to the margin/font/line hight? (I think its moderncv) I don't need any units in my resume but I bet a lot of fields have a need to use units in accomplishment descriptions in their resumes. What is the html/css equivalent of siunits?

How does html/css handle page breaks? What is the css/html equivalent of widow/orphan control? When a resume with a list of long publications goes many pages how does wkhtmlpdf update headers/footers that reference page numbers and section titles? Can it use a different header footer on pages 2+?

More generally would you recommend printing a book with html/css? And if not what publishing/document layout features do you think are relevant to a book but not resumes? If you are such a fan of wkhtmlpdf why did you use itext for your resume?

[buu700]

>kerning ... letter spacing

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_letter-spacing.asp

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>ligatures

@font-face supports this.

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>expansion/protrusion

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_hanging-punctuation....

(Simple workaround for browsers without support: http://csshowto.com/typography/hanging-punctuation-with-css/)

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>Searching the issues of wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts.

I don't know what you're referring to specifically, but I've never had a problem.

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>Wkhtmlpdf does not like negative letter spacing!

Works perfectly for me, but as always when using a rendering tool like wkhtmltopdf you need to be careful and precise with your page size and DPI settings if you want predictable results.

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>How does css/html handle the period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence?

Probably the same by default, unless you specify an alternate behaviour.

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>Ie what is html/css method for \frenchspacing?

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_word-spacing.asp

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>Does html/css provide language aware layout decisions like babel/pollyglossia?

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_lang.asp

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>Line breaking and hyphenation are notoriously horrible with html/css.

[Citation needed]

If CSS hyphenation in a particular browser doesn't work well, you can always try a JS library like this one: http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/ (wkhtmltopdf supports JavaScript execution).

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>Can you easily reference your bibtex CV and include a list of your publications in html/css?

What kind of question is that? Can you easily reference your HTML CV in Latex? Anyway, yes you can, evidently: http://code.google.com/p/bibtex-js/

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>Ie so that your city column consistently shows up in the same place after you include a new job with a date string that is longer than previous jobs.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_float.asp is pretty standard, if that's what you're talking about. I'm not 100% clear what you're asking about (I'd need to see an example), but it sounds like you're looking for either float or tables.

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>How do you do date calculations in html/css?

I'm sure some hack exists for this somewhere, but generally if you want imperative computation you'd be best served by including a JavaScript library (which, as mentioned, wkhtmltopdf will support flawlessly).

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>What is the html/css equivalent of siunits?

Obviously it would be silly to claim pure HTML/CSS as a holy grail of math-related symbol rendering, but if you find yourself in the position of needing this capability in an HTML/CSS document, try this: http://www.mathjax.org/

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>How does html/css handle page breaks?

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_print_pageba.asp

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>What is the css/html equivalent of widow/orphan control?

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/page.html#break-inside

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>When a resume with a list of long publications goes many pages how does wkhtmlpdf update headers/footers that reference page numbers and section titles?

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7174900/459881

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>Can it use a different header footer on pages 2+?

Should be fairly trivial to add on the to the previous solution.

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>More generally would you recommend printing a book with html/css?

Sure, why not? I'd personally prefer something like Markdown from a syntactic perspective (which renders to HTML/CSS), given the large amount of text to be written, but from a formatting perspective it would be perfectly fine.

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>If you are such a fan of wkhtmlpdf why did you use itext for your resume?

I didn't? I'd never heard of iText before, but my build script does run the output of wkhtmltopdf through pdftk to add metadata; it's possible that iText is a dependency of pdftk. If you want the source I have it up here: http://buu700.com/cv.html

[dfc]

It is cute that you pasted a lot of reference links mentioning css support. It would have been somewhat more effective if there were actual working examples occasionally. You certainly did not demonstrate that any of it would be easy...

kerning ... letter spacing -- It works "best" when pixels are used as the unit? Joke. Do you know the right amount of pixels for different line heights/font sizes? Calculating it every time is an easy implementation?

ligatures -- I could not find any good real world examples of @font-face, and none with examples of not inserting ligatures into words that should not have characters replaced by ligatures.

expansion/protrusion -- According to your reference NO MAJOR BROWSERS support it and the simple workaround is a kludge and does not work inside of flowed text. Joke.

wkhtmlpdf lists 50 something issues with fonts -- You don’t know what I am referring to? I am referring to the 50+ issues for wkhtmlpdf on their project. That is complicated?

negative letter spacing -- Letter spacing does not require a lot of effort with latex.

period after Dr. versus the end of a sentence -- You think manually specifying the behavior is easy?

frenchspacing -- You realize that your link has nothing to do with frenchspacing right?

babel/pollyglossia -- Yet again your link has nothing to do with the aforementioned packages.

Line breaking -- Do you really need a citation for html/css's awful line breaking behavior? Maybe this discussion is a bit out of your wheelhouse? To get html/css quality line breaks in latex you have to turn \sloppy on.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974963 or http://web.archive.org/web/20070203140340/http://www.nat.vu....

bibtex -- What kind of question is the "ability to build a list of publications with bibtex in a resume/cv?" Vitally important for any academic field. (FYI by referencing I meant point your resume at a .bib file and having them seamlessly included) Have you tested this or do you have any examples of it playing nicely with all of the other hacks/kludges/might-work solutions you posted? What about changing the formats to a different industry standard? You think creating your own template to handle all the many corner cases is an easy solution compared to bibtex?

siunits -- Mathjax has nothing to do with siunits. Seriously this was almost as bad as your babel/pollyglossia solution.

page breaks? -- Awesome you found some css documents that mention page breaks and orphan control. Did you notice how widely supported this is? And how about these caveats:

"You cannot use this property on absolutely positioned elements.

Use the page-breaking properties as few times as possible and avoid page-breaking properties inside tables, floating elements, and block elements with borders."

headers/footers -- Should be? Lets try and discuss the things you know about and have a little experience with?

book quality publication -- I should have read this first. It seems that you do not really understand the requirements of publication quality documents. FYI, when you publish something most of the emphasis is on your consumer/audience. So while its wonderful that your prefer writing in markdown I am not sure why the consumer is going to care about your "syntactic perspective." Take a look at the highest voted answers for beautifully published documents:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/1319/7490

Or better yet try take a look at a tufte book and tell me that an html implementation would be perfectly fine.

wkthtmlpdf -- Its in the creator/producer field of your resume. You do understand your toolset right? You needed an additional tool to add metadata to your resume? You cant just add it easily by hand at the top of your document? Joke.

[wahnfrieden]

Mostly irrelevant since you can just as easily export a web page to PDF.

[nzmsv]

There is a world of difference between a proper typesetting engine (such as LaTeX) and HTML-to-PDF. Box layout, hyphenation, ligatures - the list goes on. Of course, optimizing the typography in your resume is likely unnecessary. But that doesn't make the difference go away.