RickCV

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|  __ \(_)    | |   / ____\ \    / /
| |__) |_  ___| | _| |     \ \  / / 
|  _  /| |/ __| |/ / |      \ \/ /  
| | \ \| | (__|   <| |____   \  /   
|_|  \_\_|\___|_|\_\\_____|   \/  [rɪk-si-vi]
A dynamic template for your resume and cover letter

Resume and cover letter builder that runs entirely in your browser. No account, no upload, no server. Your data stays on your device.

Use it here: https://cv.rickinto.place/

What it does

• Live editor. Form on the left, the finished document on the right, updated as you type. Click anything in the preview to jump to its field.
• Imports your old resume. PDF, Word (.docx), LinkedIn export, JSON Resume, Reactive Resume, a RickCV backup or plain text. Read locally without an AI model, and shown to you before anything changes.
• Cover letter included, laid out to DIN 5008 for German applications.
• Nine themes, or your own: a theme is one CSS file, and you can write it inside the builder.
• Detailed styling. Colours, typefaces, font size, sidebar width, margins, heading sizes, spacing. Your choices override the theme, and one button hands the palette back to it.
• Real pages. A4 or US Letter, as many sheets as the content needs, blocks never cut in half. The preview shows exactly what the PDF will contain. You decide what follow-up sheets repeat (sidebar, header, contact, photo).
• Your own sections. Rename, reorder or add career categories. "My journey" still exports as professional experience.
• Optional blocks for skills, languages, interests, projects, mobility, references and links, plus the place and date line German resumes end with.
• Honest ATS support. Tagged PDF, a clean reading order, no hidden text. You can see and edit what an applicant tracking system reads.
• Works with your AI. No model built in, but RickCV writes a ready brief for a chat or an agent, and the answer goes back in through the normal import.
• German and English for interface and document. Light and dark mode.
• Undo and redo for everything, including replacing the whole document.
• Fully keyboard operable.
• Works offline. Fonts and around 150 icons ship with it. No request ever reaches a third party.
• Export as PDF, RickCV backup, resume.json (JSON Resume), a shareable link or raw JSON.

Themes

All nine with pictures:

Any other .css file can be dropped onto the builder or picked under Themes.

Importing

Drop a file anywhere on the page or use Import:

The dialog first shows what it found and lets you replace the document (your styling stays) or add to it. Nothing changes until you confirm. Structured formats are exact; text and PDF imports are a draft and say so. Where little is recognised, the dialog shows the raw text so you can sort it in by hand.

The PDF import handles sidebars, letter-spaced headings, dates in any position, German two-column lists (Go ●●●●○ becomes a skill rated four of five), photo and signature by their position, icon fonts, bullets missing from the text layer, and a cover letter before or after the resume.

Saving as PDF

Click Save as PDF. The first time, RickCV tells you what to set in the print dialog:

Every modern browser works. Chromium gives the most predictable margins, page breaks and colours; Firefox produces a usable PDF as well.

Your document is saved in the browser as you type, but only in that browser on that device. Use Export for a backup or to keep several versions.

ATS and hidden text

RickCV no longer hides a copy of your data behind the layout by default. Detectors treat invisible text as manipulation, and in a study of 196,682 real resumes about 1 % carried it, mostly hidden skill lists.

What actually helps: a tagged PDF with a proper reading order, name and contact before the career, SVG icons that leave no stray words in the extracted text, and the document title as PDF title and filename. For very graphic layouts, Machine readability adds a visible plain-text page you can read and edit. The invisible mode still exists, clearly marked.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has no proven, stable effect according to a 2026 survey of 45 studies, so RickCV does not do it.

Sources: Prompt injection in LLM-based resume screening · Optimizing Visibility in Generative Engines: A Critical Survey · PhantomLint · W3C: reading order in PDF

For AI agents

An agent can hand a person a finished application as a link:

https://cv.rickinto.place/#data=<base64url JSON>&print=1

The data travels inside the link (one to three kilobytes without a photo) and goes through the same confirmation as any import. Format and rules are in AGENTS.md, also available as llms.txt. The PDF itself is always printed in the person's browser.

Writing a theme

Open Themes → Workshop, start from the current theme or an empty skeleton, and see every change in the document right away. A list of all hooks and variables inserts selectors at the cursor. Save as .css gives you the finished theme. Contribute opens a pull request with your file on GitHub.

The markup is a documented, versioned contract: themes/CONTRACT.md. Themes live in their own cascade layer and win without !important. On load, @import, remote url() and rules aimed at the plain-text layer (.ats-…) are removed, and the builder says so.

python3 tools/build-themes.py          # themes/*.css → js/theme-data.js
python3 tools/make-theme-previews.py   # gallery images for themes/README.md
node tests/theme.test.mjs              # contract + every theme in themes/

Hosting it yourself

RickCV is a static site with nothing to build or configure. Copy the folder to any host, or just double-click index.html.

git clone https://github.com/rickintoplace/RickCV.git

A Content-Security-Policy in a <meta> tag allows scripts, fonts and images only from the site itself, so an imported document or theme can neither load a tracking pixel nor run a script. For the same reason images from web addresses are not shown; upload them instead. A host that sends headers may add frame-ancestors 'self'.

Project structure

Every file is a plain script, which is why index.html works by double-click. The js/theme-data.js and js/icon-data.js bundles are committed for the same reason.

Typefaces ship as static 400 and 700 files and ligatures are switched off. Both keep every letter as real text in PDFs printed from Firefox.

Contributing

Fork, change, open a pull request. There is nothing to install. The easiest contribution is a theme, the second most useful is a resume RickCV reads badly, added as a fixture to tests/fixtures/.

node tests/model.test.mjs       # migration, foreign documents, dates, undo
node tests/import.test.mjs      # import parsers
node tests/theme.test.mjs       # theme contract
node tests/app.test.mjs         # the builder in Chromium: CSP, preview, foreign senders
node tests/roundtrip.test.mjs   # prints every theme and reads the PDF back in

The browser tests look for Chromium or Chrome in CHROME, then PATH, then the default install locations, and are skipped without one. With REQUIRE_BROWSER=1 (as in CI) a missing browser fails the run.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Use it, change it, host it, also commercially. Anyone who uses your version, including over a network, must be able to get its source code.

Third-party components keep their licences: Lucide icons (ISC), the typefaces (SIL OFL) and Material Symbols (Apache-2.0) in licenses/, and pdf.js (Apache-2.0) in vendor/.