JobAppWorkspace

A small, collaborative workspace for building resumes and cover letters in the lab. Covered in this tutorial: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gVLBdXAYfQtebeNFwlMu-YpJRynHwsLlNmLq3OXxAo4/edit?usp=sharing

Resumes are written as RenderCV YAML (→ Typst → PDF); cover letters are LaTeX with a script to compile + archive per-company copies.

The idea: keep one tuned design block and a couple of helper scripts that everyone shares, so you only ever edit your own content, not the formatting plumbing.

What's here

JobAppWorkspace/
├── example/
│   └── Example_Resume.yaml      # dummy content + the shared, tuned design block — copy this to start
├── cl/
│   ├── cover_letter_template.tex  # LaTeX cover letter with [bracketed] placeholders
│   └── save_letter.py             # compile the .tex and archive it as <company>_cover_letter.pdf
├── requirements.txt               # Python deps (rendercv[full], pinned)
├── .gitignore                     # keeps personal files (your real resume, signature, archives) out of git
└── README.md

Keep personal stuff out of the repo. Your real resume YAML, your signature.png, and the oldletters/ / oldresumes/ archives are gitignored on purpose. Don't force-add them.

Setup

• Python 3.x
• A LaTeX engine for cover letters: MiKTeX on Windows (gives you pdflatex). This is not a pip package, so install it separately.

Create a virtual environment and install the Python deps:

python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1     # macOS/Linux: source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

requirements.txt pulls in rendercv[full] — the full extra bundles Typst, so you don't need a separate Typst install. After this, re-apply the Education-gap patch (see "Known issue" below) since it touches the installed package.

Resume workflow

1. Copy the example to your own file:

   Copy-Item example\Example_Resume.yaml Jane_Doe_Resume.yaml

2. Edit cv: (your content). Leave design: / locale: / settings: alone unless you know what you're changing.
3. Render. This one-liner renders and archives a copy under oldresumes\<tag>\ so you keep a snapshot of each tailored version:

   $company="standard"; rendercv render .\Jane_Doe_Resume.yaml; `
     New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "oldresumes\$company"; `
     Copy-Item -Path "rendercv_output\*" -Destination "oldresumes\$company" -Recurse

   The PDF lands in rendercv_output\.

Windows console gotcha (UTF-8)

RenderCV prints Unicode (e.g. ✓) and the default Windows console (cp1252) can crash with UnicodeEncodeError. If that happens, set UTF-8 for the session first:

$env:PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-8"; $env:PYTHONUTF8="1"

Cover letter workflow

1. Edit cl/cover_letter_template.tex — fill in the [bracketed] placeholders (your name/contact in the header, the company, the role, and the body).
2. Signature loading: drop your own signature.png into cl/ (a scan/photo of your signature, transparent background works best). It's gitignored, so it stays on your machine. The template uses \IfFileExists — if there's no signature.png, it falls back to typing your name, so it always compiles.
3. Compile + archive a named copy:

   python cl\save_letter.py "Acme Corp"

   Output: cl\oldletters\acme_corp_cover_letter.pdf. Aux files are cleaned up automatically.

Known issue: extra margin below the Education section

The engineeringresumes theme renders an empty second-row block for education entries that have no highlights, which shows up as a phantom gap below the Education section. RenderCV's templates live in the installed package (not in this repo), so this is a local patch you re-apply after any pip install/upgrade of rendercv.

Find the package dir:

python -c "import rendercv,os;print(os.path.dirname(rendercv.__file__))"

Edit renderer\templater\templates\typst\entries\EducationEntry.j2.typ and change the second-row guard from:

{% if not design.entries.short_second_row %}

to:

{% if not design.entries.short_second_row and entry.main_column.splitlines()[first_row_lines:]|length > 0 %}

This stops emitting the empty block so the phantom gap disappears. (Regular entries don't wrap the empty block, so they're unaffected — only Education needs this.)

Verified on rendercv 2.6.

Contributing

This is a shared lab workspace — improvements to the template, the scripts, or these docs are welcome. Keep all personal data (real resumes, signatures, contact info) out of commits.