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Resume Using LaTeX and PHP

Beeing actively searching for a new Job, I needed to distribute muy resume in an easy way. Keeping my resume up to date proved to be a hassle, and formatting in Microsoft Word was never as good as I wished. Moreover, any simple update caused the formatting to span multiple pages, or simply look bad.

This is when I finally turned to LaTeX to format and distribute my wiki.

The goal is to have a nice looking resume that can :

For this, I wrote and formatted my resume in LaTeX (see below or the latex source code), including some basic time-counting functions and translations.

Now, when I want to distribute it, I have to compile the latex to re-calculate everything…

Informatitians are lazy people, so instead of compiling it by hand every time I wanted to send it out, I wrote some php to compile the resume on the spot each time someone wants to download it.

The resume is now accessible for demo at the following address :

Of course, 2 other urls will generate the resume including my private contact informations, but I will not disclose these urls on this public wiki…

You will find below the LaTeX source code as well as the current php script to call the latex compiler.

I am in the process of adding the following functionalities :

LaTeX

Here is the LaTeX code used to compile my resume :


PHP

At first, I used a remote API to have the LaTeX sources compiled by a third party (this saved me some time first). Then, I was growing more and more uneasy to use a third party service (what about downtimes, confidentiality, …).

So I moved on and installed a LaTeX compiler on my NAS and wrote the php code to compile my files locally.

Compile locally

You first need to install LaTeX on the webserver, if like me you have an exotic architecture for your NAS hardware, you can follow this guide : Install LaTeX on a Synology NAS

Once LaTeX is installed, here is the php file I used to call the compiler on-demand:


Call a remote API to compile LaTeX files

The Idea is to call a remote API to compile the latex file on the spot. Also, we add a few settings to the latex file.