The last time I updated my resume I decided that it needed some major revisions. I didn't want to use a WYSIWYG editor anymore and I wanted to start tracking changes to my resume with git. After looking at various plain text file formats and markup options, and even though I have a fondness for the txt2tags syntax, I decided on Markdown. For better or worse, and I suspect due mostly to the popularity of GitHub, Markdown has become a de facto standard syntax for geeks writing documents that other people might read.

With Markdown as a source format I experimented with pandoc - a universal document converter to generate output files.

With the pandoc workflow, it is possible to write a document in plain text and then generate other types of documents such as HTML, Word processor formats (Microsoft Word docx) and PDF (via LaTeX).

So for people who insist on having a resume in Comic Sans:

or perhaps Game of Thrones is more your style (via the Artificial Uncial font):

pandoc has you covered.

The most challenging thing was figuring out the names of the fonts available, the packages needed to use them with pandoc, and the pandoc command-line syntax for activating them.

I gathered my notes and sample outputs in a github repo:

https://github.com/danstoner/pandoc_samples

I can spit out a new PDF of my resume by editing the Markdown source in my favorite text editor (emacs), commiting the changes to git, and running one command:

$ pandoc --latex-engine=xelatex -V geometry=margin=.75in -V mainfont="TeX Gyre Heros" -o danstonerresume.pdf danstonerresume.md