How to make a good PDF résumé without purchasing Adobe Acrobat?

How to make a good PDF résumé without purchasing Adobe Acrobat (or anything else)?

Solution 1:

I use Word for formatting and CutePDF Writer to print it to PDF.

Solution 2:

Try LaTeX -- it would also look better then.
Start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX and http://miktex.org/

Solution 3:

I use OpenOffice.org's word processor to create the resume and then export it as a PDF - it works quite well. If you are used to Microsoft Word, it should be fairly easy to adopt OpenOffice.org - it's very similar to old versions of Word (before the Ribbon). A few things are in different places, but it's not that bad to get used to.

Since you are using Windows, if you have Microsoft Word installed, that should also have a way to export to PDF (or you can obtain a PDF printer, which allows you to create PDFs in the same manner that you would print a document to a regular printer).

Another option would be to learn and use LaTeX. However, I wouldn't recommend this if you just want to write and maintain your resume. It's far more useful for things like scientific and engineering publication writing (although OO.org and Word are getting better at that).

Solution 4:

MS Word 2007 has a built-in PDF exporter