pagedownCV

This repo provides three R Markdown templates for creating a dynamically generated CV using R Markdown. The templates use the pagedown library for the paged versions.

How to use

First, download or clone this repo.

Knitting

Open and knit one of the .Rmd files:

• cv-2-column.Rmd (creates a PDF when knit)
  

• cv-academic.Rmd (creates a PDF when knit; traditional one-column format, appropriate for a traditionally laid out academic CV)
  

• cv-website.Rmd (creates an HTML file when knit; example of a CV laid out as it might be used on a website)
  

Fiddling with page breaks

In both the Academic CV and the 2-column CV, you can write <br class="pageBreak" /> in your R Markdown source file to add a page break at this location.

In the Academic CV, cell content that’s overflowing to the next page might get placed in the wrong column on the subsequent page (I’ve flagged it in this issue for pagedown — hopefully there’s a solution soon). If you encounter this, you can work around it by manually inserting a page break in the row before. There’s a convenience function for this:

# Adds a page break after a row that contains a specified text in a specified column
a_data_frame |>
  manual_page_break_after_row("name-of-a-column", "Text in that column")

If you look through cv-academic.Rmd then you’ll see examples of this throughout.

Similarly, you’ll find convenience functions for replacing authors’ first names with an initial followed by a dot, and for replacing a repeated year with an empty string.

The convenience functions live in R/utility-functions.R

Motivation

The pagedown package lets you output an R Markdown file to paged HTML content which can then be saved as PDF. This means you can use R Markdown to programmatically pull out content from some spreadsheet with our CV data, output it to a paged format, do the styling with CSS, then save as PDF and/or host it online. Brilliant!

Nick Strayer’s excellent data-driven cv) package, as well as the base format for resumés provided by pagedown (pagedown::html_resume), make this easy to do.

However, their available layouts don’tsuit my taste (especially for an academic CV).

Where do the layouts come from?

When I designed the Academic CV, I was particularly inspired by the resumés of Matthew Kay and Elena Agapie. I use this format for academic purposes.

The two-column one, I originally designed in Microsoft Word, with the intention of using it for brief, professional 2-page resumés where you need to squeeze content into less space.

How does it work?

Each resumé is generated by an R Markdown file that pulls in content from the included excel file cv_data.xlsx.

The sample content comes from this google sheet, which holds my CV information along with most of the content for my website.

Enjoy!!