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 currently ships two LaTeX templates: a Standard template and a General template. Both are built on a custom document class with tightly controlled spacing, a single-column layout optimized for ATS, and clean section headers.

The Standard template is designed for technical roles — software engineers, data scientists, and research positions. It prioritizes density and information hierarchy.

The General template is a more flexible layout suitable for business, creative, and non-technical roles. It supports additional sections including Volunteering and a broader skills taxonomy.

Template selection is available in the Settings panel of the builder. Your data is portable between templates — switching templates never loses 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 (General template) — 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, with a short debounce to avoid excessive requests as you type.

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 jonathancontreras@resuzen.com with a description of what you entered and what went wrong.