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I need a good program to create and edit curriculum vitae with various neat layouts. After inputting the necessary data, it should be able to produce CVs in PDF format. No matter if it's free or not.

I've been already using MS Word 2007 to manage CVs, but now I want to try something different.

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Many agencies and job sites require the CV to be in MS word format, often due to maintaining the CVs in legacy MS Access databases or applications that only supported that format. Typically they also re-format CVs into a house style and omit your contact details when the present it to the client so the client doesn't work around them by contacting you directly. Again, they will want to get the CV in MS Word format to do this.

I've had problems in the past with CVs in PDF, and agencies have always asked for MS word. Whatever choice you make, you're probably stuck with having to produce the CV in .doc format at some point. Practically, this limits your choice to tools that will play nicely with .doc, .docx or possibly .rtf.

Options are: OpenOffice, ABIWord, KOffice, Wordperfect and possibly Framemaker. LaTeX to RTF converters do exist, although I've never used them and I don't really know whether the output is any good. I don't see anything obvious about docbook to RTF converters, but print formatters for docbook often go through TeX anyway.

If you still need to get PDF from these tools PDFCreator is based on Ghostscript and does a reasonably good job of producing PDF output from a word processor.

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+1 and thanks for pointing out the issues I may face. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar May 18 '10 at 13:03
I'd go with docs.google.com. There are some professional templates avaliable, you can export/save your document when you finished the editing. :P – Shiki May 18 '10 at 13:23
up vote 2 down vote

To be honest I think a digital CV would be better. I use mahara and it works great. It is extremely flexible and I think it looks a lot better than a hard copy CV. http://mahara.org/

I know this is a shameless plug but if you want to see a "live" example, you can check out mine here: http://resume.theblogofnate.com/view/view.php?id=2

And plus you can very easily create different CV "views" for different people using the same information! It's all very easy using drag and drop.

And if you need it in PDF format, you could always install a PDF printer and click the print button at the bottom. I know its not going to look like a traditional resume/CV but there is no reason why you can't reference the CV in the resume to allow you to go into more detail of your skills.

My two cents anyways.

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up vote 0 down vote

I think you could buy and read a litlle powerful book by a guy who knows this things very well: Joel Spolsky (see his blog for articles on this subject (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/).

I've read It and used some of his tips during an interview I had. Try It, I'm not a Joel relative nor a seller ;)

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Thanks for your book suggestion; but I need a sofware. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar May 18 '10 at 9:11
What about using LaTeX? If you are on mac you can integrate perfectly with TextMate and you will reach an unbeatable typesetting. On the net there are a lot of CV latex classes. – microspino May 18 '10 at 9:19
You're right but I'm new to LaTeX and have a long way to go. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar May 18 '10 at 11:12

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