Add ability to build a cover letter

[achugr]

A cover letter is often a good addition to a CV.
A cover letter is more personalized, but there is a template that can be reused from letter to letter. Plus, it would be great if the CV and the cover letter are of the same formatting and style.
What do you think about the idea of adding the ability to generate a cover letter based on a template? I would be happy to describe my proposal in more detail if you think this functionality fits the project.

[sinaatalay]

Hello, and thank you for the suggestion!

I don't think incorporating cover letters into the current codebase would be a good idea, as it would require an entirely different code. I think the current code won't help with cover letters, as they are purely related to CVs. Therefore, I believe creating a separate package for cover letters would make more sense. A single codebase that does two independent things may not be practical to maintain.

I might be wrong (maybe for users, it's better to have them in the same package), and I would like to hear your view on this. How would you implement this, and how would it look from the user side?

[achugr]

Hello!
Overall I see the process this way: you have two YAML configs - one for CV (the base one) and one for cover letter (the base one). When you want to apply for a position, you create a new branch from the main. You put there a custom cover letter and maybe adjust your CV according to position requirements. If you find some adjustments good and generic enough, you bring them to the main branch.
This does not require it to be the same code base, this could be a separate project rendercoverletter 🙈. I think a cover letter from the implementation perspective is much simpler than a CV and in terms of the code, this can be a much smaller data model and a simple template file. Having it in one repo makes it easy to reuse the code and keep default template styles in sync.
Other than that, this could be a separate project for a cover letter and an umbrella project that makes it easy to use both and makes sure styles (fonts etc) are in sync.

[achugr]

I'll prepare a draft PR in a couple of days and we could discuss there if it fits.

[sinaatalay]

I will keep this issue until we come up with a way of handling cover letters. I agree with you; it's important to have this.

[sinaatalay]

I am moving this issue to Discussions.

[achugr]

Does this mean we could try to find a place for this feature in the project?

[sinaatalay]

Does this mean we could try to find a place for this feature in the project?

In my opinion, RenderCV should stay as only a CV generator tool for now. But it would be nice to hear what other people think about this.

[achugr]

How do you think, is there an easy way of bringing a cover letter in a different project, keeping in mind that it would be great to reuse template style (not necessary, but kinda cool) and put there some basic contact info (reuse data from CV config)?

[sinaatalay]

Another project focused on cover letters may be a good idea. RenderCV can be one of the dependencies of such a project. Also, TinyTeX of RenderCV can be used for rendering.

RenderCV’s reference is almost 100% written. I also use RenderCV as a package in the script I wrote for generating example entry images for the documentation. If you want to check it out, the script is in the docs folder.

The data models, templates, and functions of RenderCV can be leveraged into the features you mentioned very easily.

[achugr]

Could you please create a draft for it?
I'm not sure how to reuse this as a package, for example, CurriculumVitae is an attribute of RenderCVDataModel which is used in LaTeXFile for templating latex file, which makes rendering depend a lot on the data model CurriculumVitae.
I could probably extend CurriculumVitae with CoverLetter and use only fields I need in a template, so it becomes an "extended CV model that is displayed in a very reduced fashion in comparison to the base model", but this looks not too good conceptually. I am not too afraid of it, but maybe I miss something and it's all possible in a more elegant way?