Your CV in PDF

One column, and no text boxes

The CV comes out laid out in a single column, from the top down: the name first, then the contact details, then the sections one after another. There are no side-by-side columns, no tables, no text boxes and no icons standing in for words. The reason is not looks: a two-column document does not tell whoever reads it by machine whether the right column comes after the left one or should be read line by line, and the result is scrambled text, with the date of one job stuck to the name of another.

What can be promised is this, and it can also be demonstrated: the text of the PDF comes out whole and in the order it is read, with the name, the phone number and the email staying whole strings instead of breaking in half. What cannot be promised is that a recruiting program will accept it or throw it out: that program is not ours, it changes from company to company and from here it cannot be tested. Anyone guaranteeing that is guaranteeing something they have no way of checking.

Your name is spelled the way it is spelled

Inside a PDF characters are not letters, they are drawings taken from a typeface, and the ones every PDF reader already has inside cover 224 signs, which is the alphabet of western Europe and little else. Left outside are the barred l of Łukasz, the s and the t with the comma below of Ionuț and Ștefan, the twice-accented e of Nguyễn: extremely common surnames among people looking for work. Generators that use those typefaces either drop the letter in silence, or refuse to write the file at all.

Here the typeface is embedded inside the PDF, trimmed down to the signs that are really used, so the file stays light and opens the same way on any computer. Covered are the Latin alphabet with all its accents, Greek and Cyrillic. Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not: the first two are written right to left and have to be joined up, and doing that badly is worse than saying so; the others run to tens of thousands of signs and fit in no file of reasonable size. If the text holds a character that is missing, the page shows it to you rather than making a letter vanish from your name.

The data file, for next time

A CV gets updated once every couple of years, which is exactly the moment when the previous file cannot be found. Here, along with the PDF, you download a small .json file holding what you wrote: you keep it with your documents and next time you load it back here, finding every field filled in. Inside there is a version number, so a file saved today stays readable even if one day there are more fields: the ones the page does not recognise are ignored, the ones that are missing stay empty. Meanwhile what you write also stays in this browser's memory, so it is not lost if you close the page by mistake; on a computer that is not yours, the «Clear everything» button wipes it.

If the document you need is a quote instead, with tax and numbering, that is another job and it is done with Create a quote. If the text is already written in markdown and what you need is a .docx to touch up in Word, the road is Markdown to Word. And if you already have the PDF and it only needs filling in, because it is somebody else's form, you go through Write on a PDF.

What it does not do, and why

There is no photograph and there are not five graphic templates to choose from. A photo is an image, so in the extracted text it does not exist, and in several countries putting one in is advised against; templates are a matter of opinion, and here you get one done properly instead of five done poorly. There is no signing up either: no account, no email to hand over, and nothing you write goes past a server, because the PDF is built by your browser. The document typeface is downloaded from here the first time, like the rest of the page, and it takes nothing you wrote along with it.

If the CV you have to update is already a PDF, it is worth starting from its text rather than typing it all again, and to pull that out there is Extract the text from a PDF. If that text arrives broken line by line, with words cut in half, it gets put back together with Fix text copied from a PDF. And before sending it, if you suspect your sentences ran long, the check is How readable a text is.