Plain Text Resume Formatter

This utility formats plain text resumes with a clean, professional border design, making them more readable and visually appealing.

Features

• Adds a stylized border around your resume text
• Handles text wrapping with proper indentation
• Supports special formatting:
  • Pattern repetition (using // syntax)
  • Bullet points and lists
• Customizable width, padding, and margins
• if 'mobile' is in filename, then caps indentations to 4 spaces

Usage

Basic Usage

python3 format.py input_file.txt output_file.txt

Advanced Options

python3 format.py input_file.txt output_file.txt --width 80 --padding 3 --margin 1

• --width or -w: Total width of the document including borders (default: 75)
• --padding or -p: Number of spaces between text and border (default: 2)
• --margin or -m: Number of spaces outside the border (default: 0)

Using the Makefile

For convenience, you can use the included Makefile:

make format

This will format unformatted_resume.txt to resume.txt with a width of 80, padding of 3, and margin of 1.

Special Formatting Syntax

Pattern Repetition

Use // followed by a character or characters to repeat a pattern:

—— Experience //—

This renders as: —— Experience ——————————————— (repeats till end of line)

Bullet Points

Standard bullet points will have proper indentation:

• This is a bullet point with enough text that it will wrap to the next line
  and maintain proper indentation

Example

Input file:

YOUR NAME
Full Stack Software Engineer


—— Experience //—

→ Independent Developer //·
  Apr 2023 - Present (2 years)

        Self-funded exploration into agentic AI and personal projects

        • Built custom blog (Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView)
        • Tinkered with personal Lisp dialect
        • Created Counter-Strike server browser (findservers.net)
        • Refined personal LLM workflow for coding and creative work

Output: (with a width of 60)

 ┌── [resume.txt] ──────────────────────────── [utf-8] ───┐
 │                                                        │
 │   YOUR NAME                                            │
 │   Full Stack Software Engineer                         │
 │                                                        │
 │                                                        │
 │   —— Experience ————————————————————————————————————   │
 │                                                        │
 │   → Independent Developer ··························   │
 │     Apr 2023 - Present (2 years)                       │
 │                                                        │
 │           Self-funded exploration into agentic AI      │
 │           and personal projects                        │
 │                                                        │
 │           • Built custom blog (Elixir, Phoenix,        │
 │             LiveView)                                  │
 │           • Tinkered with personal Lisp dialect        │
 │           • Created Counter-Strike server browser      │
 │             (findservers.net)                          │
 │           • Refined personal LLM workflow for coding   │
 │             and creative work                          │
 │                                                        │
 └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘