Resumes and cover letters in Obsidian

As a part of my general job hunting with obsidian workflow, after I have captured listings to apply for in my vault, I then need to write/maintain both my resume and make new cover letters -- done exclusively in plaintext .^[1]

This is a quick guide on using Obsidian.md with Pandoc/Obsidian Enhancing Export and adapting the workflow by Sonya Sawtelle (so all the credits to her).

Basically the workflow goes like this.

• *Pandoc to convert .md files to .html, applying styling via a .css file. >
• Then calling on wkhtmltopdf through pandoc to convert the .mdfile of your choice to a .html, outputting into a  .pdf or a .docx-file with your choice of stying

Set up Enhancing Export

Once installed, make sure Obsidian Enhancing Export is correctly set up to recognize these tools in your system's $PATH under the sub-menu Settings/Enhancing Export/Advanced/Environment Variables. If you screwed up your paths, echo which pandocor which wkhtmltopdfand copy the paths in there.

You will have to create a new command template under Settings/Enhancing Export/Edit Command Template. For mine, I've just made a preset for CV/CL (Resume/Cover Letter).

• Because a nice thing with the workflow, is that it can be used for both a resume and as a Cover Letter exporter, and custom elements can be added before exporting the document #extra elements including image headers/profile information headers and stuff like that.

Insert the following settings in the main/extra argument fields separated by a space, or a newline as shown below

-f markdown
--resource-path="${currentDir}"
--resource-path="${attachmentFolderPath}"
--extract-media="${attachmentFolderPath}"
-c "${vaultDir}/System/Settings/Pandoc/Resume/cv_cl_stylesheet.css" -s -o "${outputPath}" -t pdf

Important things to note: You can have multiple resource paths and extract-media path, see the documentation for the variables you can use.

• Extra arguments:
  --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf

margin-left: 0.5cm
margin-right: 0.5cm
margin-top: 1cm
margin-bottom: 1cm
title: {Insert your name here}

To extract images, like profile pictures and custom icons as actual images, these need to be in a very specific format. It must be Angle Bracketed Markdown URLs and must be visible (do it by prepending !) < > is needed because the link to this specific image or resource has special characters like (), spaces, / or other characters that makes it unable to render.

Easiest way to do this is getting the links plugin by mii-key and converting them into markdown links. Just make sure that you, under Settings/Files & Links/New link Format set it to Relative path to file so Pandoc can actually get the images and attachments you're trying to export.

I like to do this manually myself. Just make sure it is in the following format:
![optional caption](<vault-relative path to image to image>){width=100}.

• Note that {width (or) height=100} is optional and is measured in pixels

My tweaks to Sonyas Original Workflow for the Resume

These are the changes and tweaks I've made inside of my own version of the stylesheet.

1. Added two new .css containers, profile for profile headers and profile-info, to insert these into your own, just create pandoc containers with an opening and closing :::: for the header and ::: for the profile-info
   1. //TODO There are also containers for profile-picture, profile picture.img respectively which are flex-boxed to take up an appropriate amount of space
   2. //TODO. I also need to implement a to/from/field
   • ✅ #do/obsidian #delete-this-tag something #delete-this-tag ➕ 2025-02-04 ✅ 2025-02-04

:::: {#profile-header .profile-header}  
::: {#profile-info .profile-info}

###### [LinkedIn.com/in/`REDACTED`](https://www.linkedin.com/in/`REDACTED`/) | [contact@`REDACTED`.com](mailto:contact@`REDACTED`.com) | +46 072 150 6698 |

**I am:** a masters-level urban planning graduate and certified Water & Wastewater engineer from Sweden. Core competencies include Geospatial analysis with GIS-programs, BIM software, python and Autodesk CAD software including Civil 3D.

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