CV maintainance is one of these painful and repetitive tasks that you don't want to burn too much time on. For a while, I have been using latex with the excellent moderncv class, but the pdf format has annoying limitations:

• Seeing a pdf document in a browser is not as nice as seeing an html webpage;
• Human Resources usually prefer to work with word documents.

I thus decided to switch to the markdown syntax, and to generate various formats with pandoc. The code of my résumé now looks like this:

Cave Johnson
============

----

>  Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT!

----

Corporate Experience
--------------------

1940-1980
:   *CEO of Aperture Science* (Upper Michigan, USA).

    Supervised the development of various gels, and of a Portable
    Quantum Tunneling Device.

Hobbies
-------

Interests
:   Refining moon rocks

The file can then be compiled in various formats. To obtain the html version:

pandoc --standalone --from markdown --to html -o index.html index.md

But the default ouptut is rather ugly. That is why I wrote a CSS to go with the html generated by pandoc. It is inspired by moderncv, and specially adapted for this use case. The command line becomes:

pandoc --standalone -c style.css --from markdown --to html -o index.html index.md

Now that you are at it, you can also generate a word document or even some plain text file. No need to build a new one in a hurry!

pandoc --from markdown --to docx -o index.docx index.md
pandoc --standalone --smart --from markdown --to plain -o index.txt index.md

You can get a look at what it looks like on my own résumé. The full code can be found on git.chmd.fr (and github).