LaTeX CV Template: One Source, Two Builds

Search “latex cv template” and the results hand you a gallery: moderncv, AltaCV, a two-column sidebar layout copied from a famous one-page resume. Every one of them answers a question about looks. moderncv itself is now flagged on CTAN as incompatible with LaTeX’s tagged-PDF output, and no gallery mentions that one career needs two documents of very different lengths.

Direct Answer: Choose a build discipline instead of a class. Keep one .tex source, two builds: a two-page single-column CV and a full-length academic CV. The short build goes to employers and parsers. The long build goes to the committees that publish no page limit at all. ResuFit handles the wording of the short build against a specific posting.

What you’ll take away:

• Why moderncv now sits on CTAN’s “Tagged PDF - incompatible” list
• The one .tex source, two builds: a two-page single-column CV and a full-length academic CV recipe, in about five lines of TeX
• Where the two-page ceiling is stated outright, and where no ceiling exists
• How to switch on tagged PDF output with \DocumentMetadata
• A comparison table for the two builds

Why is “which LaTeX CV template” the wrong question?

A template is a layout. What decides whether your CV gets read is the shape you send, and the required shape changes with whoever opens it.

The University of Cambridge Careers Service (accessed July 2026) puts it bluntly in its guide for PhDs and postdocs: “A CV for use outside academia must not be more than two pages. This is non-negotiable.” Its own comparison table gives the academic CV no page limit and the industry R&D CV two pages plus an optional publications appendix.

Harvard’s Mignone Center for Career Success (2024) states the other half: “Unlike a resume, there is no page limit, but most graduate student CVs are two to five pages in length.”

Prospects (Jisc, accessed July 2026) repeats the split for UK graduates: academic CVs are often several pages long and should be kept to three pages where possible. Its separate CV-writing guide (Jisc, accessed July 2026) quotes the careers service team at the University of Chester recommending CVs of no longer than two A4 pages, with academic CVs “slightly longer”.

Two audiences, two documents, one career. That is the entire case for one .tex source, two builds: a two-page single-column CV and a full-length academic CV.

Is moderncv still a safe LaTeX CV class?

Here is the part the template roundups have not caught up with. CTAN lists moderncv (version 2.6.1, dated 2026-06-24) under the topic “Tagged PDF - incompatible”, a topic page whose own description reads “packages which are not tagging compatible”. currvita sits on the same list, and so does KOMA-Script’s scrlttr2, the class many people use for the accompanying cover letter.

Tagging matters because of what landed underneath it. LaTeX News 42 (LaTeX Project, November 2025) reports that tagged and accessible PDF output has left prototype status and “can be used in production workflows … as long as one restricts the documents to already-supported packages”, with a live per-package tagging-status database to check against. Overleaf’s documentation (2026) describes the mechanism on its own platform: TeX Live 2025 emits tags once a \DocumentMetadata declaration sits above \documentclass.

An untagged PDF is still readable. Its text is selectable and a parser can pull characters out of it. What it lacks is declared structure, so a machine sees a page where a tagged file would show a heading followed by a list. Parsing behaviour varies from system to system, which is the reason to produce the tagged file and then test a parse rather than assume either outcome.

That gives you a rule you can check instead of a taste you have to defend: pick a class the tagging-status database supports, and keep the CV inside it. Plain article with geometry, hyperref and your own section formatting gets you further than most gallery classes, and it survives both builds.

How do I build two CVs from one .tex file?

This is the part LaTeX does that no word processor and no online builder matches. The two shapes come out of the same file, so a corrected date or a new paper is fixed once.

% cv.tex
\DocumentMetadata{tagging=on, lang=en-GB}
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[margin=2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\newif\iflongcv
\ifdefined\LONGCV \longcvtrue \fi

\begin{document}
\input{sections/header}
\input{sections/experience}
\input{sections/education}
\iflongcv
  \input{sections/publications-full}
  \input{sections/teaching}
  \input{sections/grants}
\else
  \input{sections/publications-selected}
\fi
\end{document}

Two commands produce the two files:

latexmk -pdf -jobname=cv-employer cv.tex
latexmk -pdf -jobname=cv-academic -usepretex -pretex="\def\LONGCV{}" cv.tex

That conditional is the whole trick behind one .tex source, two builds: a two-page single-column CV and a full-length academic CV. Everything shared lives in sections/, the divergence lives in five lines, and the two PDFs cannot drift apart because there is only one set of facts.

A word processor asks you to maintain two documents and hope you remember to edit both. ResuFit rewrites the wording of the short build for the job you are applying to, which is the part the typesetting engine has no opinion about. You can start from your existing PDF at ResuFit and keep the LaTeX source as your record.

What belongs in the employer build?

Keep it to two pages, one column, and headings a human and a parser both recognise.

1. Contact block in the body text, never in the page header or footer
2. Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills, Publications (selected)
3. Reverse chronological order inside each section
4. Bullets instead of tables, for anything that looks like a grid
5. Selected publications, five to ten, with the full list left to the long build
6. A text PDF, so the text can be selected in a viewer

The formatting restraint here is the same discipline our minimalist resume template guide applies inside a word processor, and the parse test is covered in full in our plain text resume guide. If your job titles undersell your skills, the structure in our functional resume guide transfers to LaTeX without changing any of this.

The two builds compared

	Employer build	Academic build
Pages	Two, described as non-negotiable by Cambridge	No page limit (Harvard GSAS, 2024)
Columns	One	One
Publications	Selected, or an appendix	Complete
Headings	Experience, Education, Skills	Field conventions, including grants and teaching
Class	Tagging-supported	Tagging-supported
Output file	cv-employer.pdf	cv-academic.pdf
Source	The same cv.tex	The same cv.tex

Which gallery habits should you drop?

Gallery habit	What to do instead
Two-column sidebar layout	One column, top to bottom
Skill rating bars and rings	Named tools with a context line
A class flagged incompatible with tagged PDF	A class the tagging-status database supports
tabular used to position sections	Section headings and lists
One document stretched to serve both audiences	Two builds from one source

Heavier design work belongs in a different tool and a different audience. Our InDesign resume guide covers that route and where it is worth the trouble.

The short version

The honest answer to “which LaTeX CV template” is a build discipline: one .tex source, two builds: a two-page single-column CV and a full-length academic CV. Pick a class that survives tagging, keep the short build to one column and two pages, let the long build run as far as the record goes, and let a five-line conditional do the rest.