LaTeX Guide

Why LaTeX?

Most resume builders produce HTML-rendered PDFs — which look fine on screen but produce inconsistent output across PDF viewers, fail ATS parsers, and break pagination in unpredictable ways.

Resuzen compiles your resume through a LaTeX typesetting engine. LaTeX has been the gold standard for precision document layout for over 40 years. The result is a properly typeset PDF with consistent margins, clean hyphenation, and reliable line spacing — the kind of output that looks like it was produced by a professional typesetter.

Your exported PDF is a true PDF, not a browser screenshot. It renders identically in every viewer, passes ATS scanners cleanly, and prints at full resolution.

The Template System

Resuzen ships eight LaTeX templates. Four are free — Classic, Minimal, ATS-Plain, and Modern Accent — all single-column and ATS-friendly. Four are premium (Pro): Editorial, Executive, Cascade, and Technical. Every template supports the same sections and content; they differ only in visual style.

Classic is the original serif layout with small-caps, underlined section headers. Minimal is a clean sans-serif with generous whitespace and light rules. ATS-Plain uses standard fonts and plain headers for maximum parser compatibility. Modern Accent adds a professional navy accent to your name and section titles.

On the premium side, Editorial is a refined serif (EB Garamond) with small-caps headers and icon contacts, and Technical pairs a sans body with monospace labels, dates, and tech stacks for engineers — both single-column, so they parse cleanly. Executive and Cascade are two-column layouts (a tinted serif sidebar and a modern sans color-band); they read beautifully for a human, but a single-column template parses more reliably in older ATS portals.

Template selection is available in the Settings panel of the builder. Your data is fully portable between templates — switching templates only changes the look, never your content.

Supported Sections

Contact — name, email, phone, LinkedIn, GitHub. All fields are optional; the header adapts to what you provide.

Summary — a free-text professional summary rendered as a paragraph below your contact block.

Experience — position title, company, location, dates, and bullet points. Supports up to 10 entries, each with up to 10 bullet points.

Education — institution, degree, location, dates, and optional fields for coursework, awards, and clubs.

Projects — project name, tech stack, dates, and bullet points. Ideal for side projects, open source, and research work.

Skills — organized into Languages, Frameworks, and Other. Renders as a compact two-column list.

Certifications — certification name, issuer, date, and credential ID.

Volunteering — organization, role, dates, and bullet points.

Section Ordering

The order of sections in your PDF is fully configurable. In the Settings panel, drag and drop sections into the order you want them to appear.

A common ordering for early-career candidates is: Contact → Summary → Education → Experience → Projects → Skills. Senior candidates often prefer to lead with Experience.

The Contact section is always rendered first as the document header and cannot be reordered.

Bullet Points

Bullet points in Experience, Projects, and Volunteering sections support a small subset of LaTeX-safe formatting. Plain text is always safe.

Avoid using raw LaTeX commands, special characters like &, %, $, #, _, {, or } in your bullet points — these are reserved LaTeX metacharacters. Resuzen automatically escapes common cases, but unusual combinations may produce unexpected output.

For best results, keep bullets to 1–2 lines of content. LaTeX handles line wrapping automatically, but very long unbroken strings (URLs, file paths) may overflow the column.

PDF Generation

When you click Download, Resuzen sends your resume data to a serverless compile endpoint. Your data is assembled into a .tex source file, compiled via pdflatex, and the resulting PDF is returned to your browser.

Compilation typically completes in 2–4 seconds. The PDF is never stored on our servers — it is generated on demand and delivered directly to you.

The live preview in the builder uses the same compile pipeline. Rather than recompiling on every keystroke, it marks itself “Outdated” when you make changes — click Update Preview to regenerate it with your latest edits.

Troubleshooting

If your PDF download fails or produces a blank page, the most common cause is a special character in one of your fields. Try removing characters like &, %, #, or $ from the field you most recently edited.

Very long words without spaces (e.g., a URL pasted into a bullet point) can cause LaTeX to overflow the line. Add a space or shorten the entry.

If a section appears empty in the PDF despite having content in the builder, check that the required fields for that section are filled. Experience entries require at least a title or company. Education entries require at least a university name.

Still stuck? Reach out at support@resuzen.com with a description of what you entered and what went wrong.