What it does
You fill in the builder’s form: contact details, experience, education, skills and projects. Resumodel turns that into LaTeX using the template you pick, and turns the same content into a PDF. In the export panel you can download the PDF to send, the LaTeX source (.tex) to edit, or your resume data as YAML to reopen later.
The .tex is real source, not a wrapper around an image. It is the same source the PDF is built from, packaged so it compiles without any other files.
The templates and where they come from
Every template is a single column of selectable text. Most are adapted from open-source LaTeX designs, and each is credited below with its license.
Meridian
Adapted from Jake's Resume by Jake Gutierrez.
License: MIT
Caliper
Adapted from the McDowell résumé format by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.
License: MIT (resumake.io port)
Compass
Adapted from Rover Resume by Subidit.
License: CC BY 4.0
github.com/subidit/rover-resume
Based on “Rover Resume” by subidit (github.com/subidit/rover-resume), licensed under CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Adapted: fonts, layout discipline, generator port.
Datum
Adapted from resumake.io (flagship template) by Saad Quadri.
License: MIT
Azimuth
Adapted from resumake.io (sans-serif template) by Saad Quadri.
License: MIT
Folio
Adapted from the RES class (res.cls) by Michael DeCorte.
License: Notice-retained (no resale)
Copyright (c) 1988,1989 by Michael DeCorte. Permission to copy all or part of this work is granted, provided that the copies are not made or distributed for resale, and that the copyright notice and this notice are retained.
Abacus
An original Resumodel design, with no upstream template.
Sextant
Adapted from resumake.io “minimal” (minimal-resume by Michael Tse).
License: MIT (resumake.io), fonts OFL
Vernier
An original Resumodel design, with no upstream template.
A real excerpt
This is one experience entry from the Meridian template, copied from the file the builder produces for a sample resume. The full download adds the page setup above it and the other sections below it.
\section{Experience}
\noindent\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
\raggedright
\textbf{Senior Product Engineer} --- \href{https://northbeam.example.com}{Northbeam Systems} \hfill Mar 2023 – Present\\
\textit{Seattle, WA}\par
Owns checkout and onboarding surfaces for a B2B logistics platform.\\
\begin{itemize}[label=\textbullet,topsep=4pt]
\item Rebuilt the quote-to-order flow, lifting completed checkouts 23\% across 40k monthly sessions.
\item Cut p95 page load from 4.1s to 1.6s by moving pricing math server-side and caching rate tables.
\item Led a 3-engineer squad through 11 releases with zero rollback incidents.
\item Introduced contract tests between billing and fulfillment that caught 14 breaking changes pre-deploy.
\end{itemize}
\end{minipage}\parCompile it yourself
The download is one .tex file, and its first lines say how to compile it. Pick whichever of these fits.
On your computer
Install a TeX distribution (TeX Live, or MacTeX on a Mac), save the download as resume.tex, and run this in the same folder. XeLaTeX writes resume.pdf beside it.
xelatex resume.texA minimal install such as BasicTeX can stop with a missing package like titlesec or enumitem. Add the package with tlmgr, or install the full distribution.
On Overleaf
Start a blank project and replace the contents of its main file with the .tex file. Open the Menu, set the compiler to XeLaTeX, and recompile. Nothing else needs to be uploaded.
With Tectonic
Tectonic is a single-binary engine built on XeTeX that fetches the packages it needs on first run, so there is no distribution to install. It is also what Resumodel uses for its own PDFs.
tectonic resume.tex
The fonts come from your TeX install, so spacing can differ very slightly from the PDF you download from Resumodel.
LaTeX pitfalls behind the scanner’s results
A LaTeX resume can look perfect and still read badly to a parser. The Resumodel scanner re-reads your PDF with two independent text extractors. Of the pitfalls below, it checks two: whether there is a real text layer, and whether the layout uses tables or columns. Ligatures it smooths over, mapping them back to plain letters as it reads, and fonts it doesn’t check at all.
A real text layer
The text-layer check gives no credit when it can’t recover selectable text, which is what a scan or outlined text looks like. A PDF compiled from the .tex has real text, so keep it that way: don’t flatten pages to images.
Two columns and tables
The layout check takes points off when it finds a two-column layout or a table. A sidebar, or a table used to line things up, is how a LaTeX resume usually ends up with one. Every template here is a single column.
Ligatures
Fonts can join letter pairs like fi and ff into one glyph, which some parsers read as a stray character. The scanner maps those glyphs back to plain letters as it reads, so it won’t flag them, but other parsers may not. The templates here turn common ligatures off in fontspec, so the text is plain letters to begin with.
Fonts that stay text
With fontspec and OpenType fonts, the PDF keeps Unicode text, so accents, quotes and dashes extract as real characters, not odd symbols. The scanner doesn’t check fonts, but its other checks read that text, so keep that setup if you swap fonts.
Compiled your own version? Scan the PDF to see what a parser recovers. More on the basics is in the ATS resume checker guide.