Stop Fighting Word Processors: Write Your Resume in Markdown Instead

You know the drill. You're staring at a Word document, fighting with text boxes, wrestling with spacing, and praying the formatting doesn't break when you export to PDF. It's 2024—why does resume creation still feel like it's stuck in 2004? If you're already living in Markdown for your code docs, notes, and READMEs, there's no reason your resume shouldn't join the party. That's exactly what LapisCV aims to fix.

LapisCV is an open-source project that gives you professionally styled resume templates that render beautifully across Typora, VSCode, and Obsidian. You write in plain Markdown, and the CSS does the heavy lifting to make it look like you actually spent hours in a design tool—when really, you just typed some headers and bullet points.

What It Does

LapisCV is essentially a collection of CSS themes and templates designed to turn your Markdown editor into a resume builder. The project provides two visual styles: the standard LapisCV theme and a newer LapisCV Serif variant (introduced in v2.0.0), both of which are designed to produce clean, professional-looking documents.

The architecture is straightforward. You download the release package, which contains CSS files and template documents. Depending on your editor of choice, you set it up slightly differently:

• In Typora, you copy the theme files into your theme folder, select "Lapis Cv" from the theme menu, then edit the Markdown template directly.
• In VSCode, you open the project folder, install the Markdown PDF extension for exporting, and preview your resume live in the editor pane.
• In Obsidian, you open the provided directory as a Vault and use CSS snippets to switch between themes.

The templates include support for an avatar image (inserted via HTML), a set of icons for contact info and section headers, and the whole thing exports to PDF with proper A4 page sizing and margins. No more manually adjusting spacing or praying your margins survive the export.

Why It's Cool

There's something genuinely satisfying about a tool that respects your existing workflow instead of forcing you into a new one. Here's why LapisCV stands out:

• Write once, export anywhere. The whole pitch is that you're not locked into a proprietary format. Your resume lives as plain Markdown, which means it's version-controllable, diffable, and portable. That's a huge win if you're a developer who's already comfortable with git.

• No design skills required. The CSS handles the visual polish. You don't need to fiddle with alignment guides or worry about inconsistent spacing. The theme does that work for you, and it does it consistently.

• Real-time preview in VSCode. The fact that you can see your resume update live as you type—right in your code editor—is a quality-of-life improvement that's hard to overstate. It makes iterative tweaking feel natural rather than painful.

• Three editors, one output. Whether you're a Typora loyalist, a VSCode power user, or an Obsidian note-taker, there's a setup path for you. The project even acknowledges that Obsidian can't handle local HTML images, so it suggests uploading your avatar as a link instead—small but thoughtful touches like that show real-world testing.

• It's just CSS. If you want to tweak colors, spacing, or fonts, you're not fighting some opaque template system. You're editing stylesheets, which means the customization ceiling is essentially as high as your CSS skills go.

How to Try It

Getting started takes about five minutes. Here's the quick path for each editor:

For Typora:

1. Download the latest release and unzip it.
2. Open Typora's theme folder (Preferences > Appearance > Open Theme Folder) and copy lapis-cv.css, lapis-cv-serif.css, and the lapis-cv directory into it.
3. Restart Typora and select "Lapis Cv" or "Lapis Cv Serif" from the theme menu.
4. Open the template file, edit it, then export to PDF (set A4 page size with 13mm top/bottom and 15mm left/right margins first).

For VSCode:

1. Download and unzip the release, then open the folder in VSCode.
2. Install the Markdown PDF extension.
3. Open the template file and hit the preview icon to see it live.
4. Right-click and select "Markdown PDF - Export (pdf)" when you're ready.

To switch between the standard and Serif themes in VSCode, you'll edit the style path in .vscode/settings.json—swap lapis-cv.css for lapis-cv-serif.css.

For Obsidian:

Download the release, open the lapis-cv-obsidian directory as a Vault, edit the template, and export. Switch themes under Options > Appearance > CSS snippets.

You can find the full repository and all the details at github.com/bingyanstudio/lapiscv.

Final Thoughts

LapisCV isn't trying to be the most feature-rich resume builder out there—it's trying to be the most convenient one for people who already live in Markdown. If you're a developer who dreads opening a word processor, this project is worth a look. The setup is minimal, the output looks clean, and the fact that your resume becomes a plain-text file means you can finally stop worrying about formatting and start worrying about whether your bullet points actually sound good. Give it a spin—you might find that updating your resume no longer feels like a chore.

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