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The Beginning

The journey started back in high school, when I needed a CV for my very first job application. I wasn’t much into computers at the time, so I used the classic LibreOffice Writer to make a simple CV. It was a tedious process - everything had to be formatted manually. Painful, but manageable since there wasn’t much content.

LibreOffice Writer is all fun until you want something serious.

$\LaTeX$ Superiority2022/01

Fast forward to engineering school - I needed another CV for an internship. This time, I decided to use $\LaTeX$. It was more complex, but it gave me much better formatting and structure. $\LaTeX$ also comes with the simplicity of a single text file.

In the end, my CV lived as a single .tex file in a Git repository hosted on GitHub.

Wait… did I say GitHub? Why not build it with GitHub Actions?

So I did. I created a simple workflow that compiled my .tex file into a PDF every time I pushed changes. It was great until I ran into my next problem challenge.

A quick summary of $\LaTeX$’s strengths and weaknesses:

Pros:

• Superior formatting and structure
• Very powerful for complex documents
• Excellent for mathematical equations
• Cool logo command \LaTeX: $\LaTeX$

Cons:

• Massive download size

  $ apt install texlive-full
  Installing:
  texlive-full
  ...
  Summary:
  Upgrading: 0, Installing: 797, Removing: 0, Not Upgrading: 0
  Download size: 4820 MB
  Space needed: 9183 MB

• Steep learning curve (pixel-perfect layouts are tricky)
• Slow compilation

Lua Machinery2024/02

Then I faced a new problem: I wanted to have two CVs, one in English and one in French, with the same layout. I decided to change my approach and use two files: one for the content and one for the layout.

The content went into a JSON file, and the layout remained in $\LaTeX$.

This is where the real power of lualatex came in. Using Lua’s integration, I could load JSON directly into the document. By simply changing one parameter (lang), I could generate both CVs from the same content file.

Lua Sorcery2024/11

This was a big improvement, but I didn’t like having too much Lua mixed directly into my $\LaTeX$ file. So I split the Lua code into a dedicated .lua file, which the .tex file could call. This left me with three files:

1. The JSON content
2. The $\LaTeX$ layout
3. The Lua functions

Naturally, I decided to change again.

The attentive reader would think about a Lua script that generates a .tex file from the JSON, then compiles it with lualatex. But that was too easy (too simple) and as an idiot, I wanted something more complex.

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity"
- Terry A. Davis (RIP child of God)

So naturally, I made a Lua script that generated a .tex file that still contained Lua calls… and then launched lualatex. Yes, a self-invoking Lua script that writes a .tex file that calls Lua code to generate itself. (You’re allowed to reread that sentence to fully appreciate the complexity nonsense.)

In the end, it worked pretty fast and could generate both CVs with a single command. But editing was still slow because I had to wait for lualatex every time I made a change.

I ended up pushing this questionable creation to luarocks, just in case someone wants to use this fraudulent script :nerd_face:. It works as both a library and a script.

The repository is available here: https://github.com/Its-Just-Nans/curriculum-vitae

Here are the timings for generating two CVs with this method:

$ time lua curriculum_vitae.lua
real    0m3,297s
user    0m2,907s
sys     0m0,389s

Typst Supremacy2025/06

Then after playing around with Typst, it’s impossible to resist rewriting everything.

Typst is a modern typesetting system much faster than $\LaTeX$ and with a cleaner syntax. Typst also supports programming within the document (and much more) like built-in JSON support, allowing me to generate my layout directly from my JSON file.

It also supports incremental compilation (only recompiling the parts that change) making it far faster than $\LaTeX$ during edits.

The repository is available here: https://github.com/Its-Just-Nans/porygon

Usage would be something like this:

#import "@preview/porygon:0.1.0": show-cv

#let path_json = sys.inputs.at("CV_JSON", default: "cv_data.json")
#let data = json(path_json)
#show-cv(data)

Here are the timings for generating two CVs with this method:

$ time typst compile cv.typ --input CV_LANG=fr cv_fr.pdf
real    0m0,509s
user    0m0,331s
sys     0m0,185s

$ time typst compile cv.typ --input CV_LANG=en cv_en.pdf
real    0m0,442s
user    0m0,265s
sys     0m0,182s

The time difference is caused by the French CV including a profile picture.