I Built a CV Generator So I Never Touch Google Docs Again

Every developer I know has five versions of their CV scattered across Google Drive. One is outdated. Two have broken formatting. One is a PDF someone asked for three months ago. And the “real” one? Nobody’s sure which file that is.

Updating a CV shouldn’t require fighting with margin sizes in a word processor. So I built a tool that skips all of that.

What It Does

Head to /cv on this site. Fill in your details — name, experience, skills, education, projects. Hit generate. Get a clean, consistently formatted PDF. Done.

No account. No login. No templates to wrestle with. You type, you download.

Why Not Just Use Google Docs

Because Google Docs is a general-purpose document editor pretending to be a layout tool. You spend more time nudging bullet points than writing about your actual experience.

A CV is structured data. It has sections, dates, lists. Treating it like a freeform document is the wrong abstraction.

How It Works Under the Hood

The entire thing runs client-side. No server. No data leaves your browser.

You fill in an HTML form. The form data renders into a styled HTML template. Then html2pdf.js converts that rendered HTML into a PDF you can download. That’s it.

Here’s the core of the PDF generation:

import html2pdf from "html2pdf.js";

async function generatePdf(element: HTMLElement): Promise<void> {
  const options = {
    margin: [10, 10, 10, 10],
    filename: "resume.pdf",
    image: { type: "jpeg", quality: 0.98 },
    html2canvas: { scale: 2, useCORS: true },
    jsPDF: { unit: "mm", format: "a4", orientation: "portrait" },
  };

  await html2pdf().set(options).from(element).save();
}

You pass it the DOM element containing your rendered CV. It screenshots it with html2canvas, wraps it in a PDF with jsPDF, and triggers a download. The whole library chain is around 200KB gzipped.

The beauty of this approach: you style the CV with regular CSS. No PDF-specific layout language. No coordinate math. Just HTML and CSS doing what they already do well.

One Source of Truth

The real win isn’t the PDF generation. It’s having a single place where your CV lives.

When you get that recruiter message on a Tuesday afternoon and they want your resume “by end of day” — you don’t dig through folders. You go to /cv, check that everything is current, and hit download. Thirty seconds.

When you finish a project worth mentioning, you add it once. When you learn a new technology, you update one list. No syncing between files. No “wait, did I update the PDF version too?”

What’s Coming Next

The next step is LinkedIn integration.

The LinkedIn API lets you pull profile data — work history, education, skills, certifications. The plan is to connect your LinkedIn account and have the generator auto-populate your fields. Your CV stays current without you touching it.

You update your experience in one place — LinkedIn, where you’re probably updating it anyway — and the CV follows. No duplicate effort.

Try It

The tool is live at /cv. It’s free, it’s fast, and it doesn’t store your data anywhere.

Stop maintaining five versions of the same document. Have one source of truth, generate a clean PDF when you need it, and spend your time on work that actually matters.

Sources:

• html2pdf.js — client-side HTML to PDF generation
• LinkedIn API — LinkedIn profile data API documentation