Web publishing and paper publishing the same resume without double work?

March 18, 2006 3:47 PM

I have a resume in Microsoft Word that I use to print and an HTML resume online. Every time I update my resume, I have to do it by hand twice. How do I cut my work in half?

Right now I have a resume in Microsoft Word, and am thinking of moving it to Indesign to have better control over the formatting.

I also have hand copied that resume's formatting and content over to my website using a layout grid in Golive (looking at the html generated, it seems to be a bunch of tables, rather than CSS or anything).

Is there any way to just work on this resume in one program? I realize I can export to pdf and link that, but I hate looking at PDFs in a browser, and it just introduces too many problems for potential clients.

I've looked around the MeFi threads about pdf-->html converters or .doc-->html converters that don't cause problems, but haven't found any good options.

I'm on a mac.

posted by sdis to computers & internet (11 comments total)

The XML Resume Library is a great tool. It requires a little setup but it lets you maintain one master copy of a resume and output it in all sorts of formats, as well as target different versions for different jobs without altering the master.
posted by Eater at 3:53 PM on March 18, 2006

What version of Word are you using? If you've written your resume using proper paragraph, header and list styles for formatting, exporting it as html (filtered) in Word will give you fairly clean code - proper css styles and that sort of thing. I believe the feature is available in Word XP and higher, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
posted by philscience at 4:05 PM on March 18, 2006

Could you just save a copy as pdf and post that online?
posted by blue_beetle at 4:13 PM on March 18, 2006

Use a print stylesheet for printing your HTML page?
posted by rhapsodie at 5:12 PM on March 18, 2006

I feel like I've been struggling this problem forever now. For a while I was using an XSLT solution I wrote similar to the one that Eater mentions. The problem was the folks who asked specifically for .doc files on their web submission forms. (I've got a solution for someone with more ambition than I -- generate an Applescript that opens word and lays out the resume.)

Next, I created a HTML version with CSS to format both the print and screen versions. (The most readable fonts differ for the two mediums.) This worked pretty well, except that I keep hearing that you're supposed to put a header on all pages of your resume except for the first. You can massage your HTML/CSS to such a header, but until we've got CSS3 this will be a royal PITA.

I'm currently using Pages to do the formatting. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of PDF (print) rendering and doesn't do too badly on the HTML. If/When HTML becomes important to me again, I'm pretty sure I can work around the few formatting problems I do have by a few strategic tweaks to my layout. Plus, I have the option to export to .doc when somebody requires it.
posted by Mr Stickfigure at 6:10 PM on March 18, 2006

Have you tried opening the html file in Word and then just saving it as a .doc? It being MS I can't gaurantee results, but there's a chance it'll work without breaking too much formatting.
posted by Sparx at 6:40 PM on March 18, 2006

If you want to go the word->html route. Tidy is your friend for cleaning up MS html.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:20 PM on March 18, 2006

Tidy seems to clean up the code, but does it do anything to make the formatting more accurate? I'm trying to reproduce columns and tabs and the html has no such things..
posted by sdis at 9:52 PM on March 18, 2006

Yeah, I just went through this a week ago, after a job site demanded that I submit both HTML and .doc versions of my resume. After a week of struggle, here are the best solutions I found, entirely for free. This procedure doesn't cut the work in half, and it's for Windows, so it probably won't answer your question—but to help future AskMefites, I'm going to post it anyway.

(1) I laid out my resume in Adobe InDesign.

(2) I printed to PDF via Adobe Distiller.

(3) To convert this PDF to HTML, I used the Sourceforge version of pdf2html plus pdf2htmlgui. In More Options, I checked "generate complex document," "generate no frames," and "do not merge paragraphs." I opened the resulting HTML document up in Microsoft FrontPage ('cause that's what I happen to have a free version of) and cleaned up the spacing and OCR text a bit. Substitute your favorite HTML editor here.

The HTML layout created by pdf2html uses absolute positioning, so it's not great for compatibility with different monitor resolutions, nor would I recommend it if you're trying to show off your Web design skills. pdf2html just happens to be vastly more accurate when working with a fairly complex layout than are the other free solutions listed in various pdf --> html threads on AskMefi. The ideal solution would really be to import the InDesign document into Adobe GoLive, as far as I can gather—and since you have GoLive, you're in luck.

(As far as Sparx' question is concerned, I tried to import the resulting HTML file into Word to bypass this next step, but Word completely mangled it. Complex layouts are Word's natural enemy, it seems.)

(4) So to convert this PDF to a Word .doc, I used the free trial of BCL Drake. Under Tools --> Options --> General I selected Multi-Column, Preserve Layout - use text boxes, Preserve Paragraph, and Substitute Fonts. Under Tools --> Options --> Extraction I chose Extract Text, Extract Hyperlinks, and Extract Images As Jpeg Format at 100%. (The bitmap format probably offers better reproduction, but I didn't want the document to be huge.)

This software, like pdf2html, creates slightly imperfect layouts—but since it uses text boxes to preserve your original layout and embeds any images you used in the original PDF, it saves you the tedious work of recreating an InDesign layout by hand in Word. As with pdf2html, BCL Drake is vastly more accurate when working with a fairly complex layout than are the other free solutions listed in various pdf --> .doc threads on AskMefi.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help, sdis. I just hope this solution helps someone.
posted by limeonaire at 10:53 PM on March 18, 2006

I just had a quick look at the result of saving my CV, which I did in OpenOffice.org, as an html file. Looks pretty decent to me (it's all tables and lists, but they're the same tables and lists I set up in the original, so that's fair).

OOo can export to .doc and .pdf too, if you want.
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 AM on March 19, 2006

Two versions of your resume? I've got four:

• HTML
• Word .doc
• PDF (of the Word .doc)
• ASCII text

I still rely on copy-paste for most of it. The PDF descends from the .doc, but the other two versions require updating by hand. I figure the time it would take to set up a complex scripted system that updates numerous files at once is time that's probably better used elsewhere (say, looking for that next job).
posted by werty at 6:10 AM on March 19, 2006