markup

2 Articles

Documentation By Markup

January 18, 2017 by 28 Comments

Things seem to go in cycles. Writing a document using old-fashioned tools like TROFF or LaTeX is like knowing a secret code. Visual editors quickly took over, although even WordStar had some “dot commands” that you put in as text. Then HTML showed up and we were back to coding formatting as text strings.

Fast forward to the present, and HTML’s ubiquity makes that seem normal. Sure, there are visual editors, but it seems perfectly normal now to write <b> for bold text. However, as HTML grows to handle more tasks it also gets more complex. That’s led to the creation of things like Markdown which is just for simple text formatting. Continue reading “Documentation By Markup” →

Your Resume All Cinched Up In LaTeX

July 11, 2013 by 59 Comments

latex-resume

Engineers just do things differently, which is why this hack makes a lot of sense to us. Instead of choosing a platform like Open Office to maintain his resume [Campbell Hennessy] renders his employment and references using LaTeX.

We separate content from styling on the web all the time using CSS and content management systems (Hackaday uses WordPress). And with the online component of employment history and job applications becoming progressively more important it makes a lot of sense to prepare your CV accordingly.

LaTeX is a markup language that makes graphically pleasing typesetting effects a snap. We’ve seen it used to label resistor storage tubes and server side hacks to embed the markup in HTML. If you haven’t tried it out yourself just grab your resume (which probably needs updating anyway), a LaTeX rendering tool of your choice, crack those knuckles, and follow along with [Campbell’s] experience.