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Discussions about documents don't usually belong in a programming forum, but for this I felt none of the other categories were more appropriate.
For the past few years I've been managing my resume and cover letters using Open Office. Although I don't update my resume often, I still can't help but feel like there must be a better way. Yesterday I installed texlive-core and, following online LaTeX tutorials, I spent some time experimenting with the TeX syntax and creating a simple Makefile for generating different output formats (dvi, pdf, etc.). It was about what I expected, and being plain text would be easy to manage using git, but it's still not quite what I'm after; I think what I really want is to separate the data from the formatting not only logically, but also "physically" so that the data is contained in a file separate from the formatting.
This was when I had the idea of using a markup language with stylesheets to manage my resume and cover letters. It would be great if I could maintain my resume data in one file and use different stylesheets for displaying the resume on a webpage, as plain text, or in a portable document format such as DVI or PDF. Is this common practice, and how is it typically done? Is it easy to generate quality printable documents using this method? I have rudimentary experience with HTML and CSS, but I'm more than willing to learn XML and XSLT if that is the best route to go (I suspect it is, but I could be wrong). Please let me know about your opinions or experiences.
Thanks
Last edited by cmtptr (2010-08-15 20:10:21)
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XML and XSLT are separate, but they're not suitable for printing / pdf generation - LaTeX is. XML is really fluid and has no notions of typesetting built in. It's perfect for on-line reports you view with a web browser.
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XML and XSLT are separate, but they're not suitable for printing / pdf generation - LaTeX is. XML is really fluid and has no notions of typesetting built in. It's perfect for on-line reports you view with a web browser.
Can I ask why XML and XSLT aren't suitable for printing / pdf generation? Using XSL-FO I can define a page size, margin widths, etc., right? Just because it isn't normally done doesn't immediately make it a bad idea. I was under the impression that XML was intended to be abstract enough that it could be used for more than just web pages or data transfer.
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