I spent 3 hours trying to fix a simple mistake on my resume

I was updating my resume last night and couldn't figure out why the formatting looked wrong in one section. It turned out I had accidentally added an extra space before a bullet point, which threw off the whole layout. Has anyone else lost a ton of time on a tiny resume error?

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3 Comments

bethjackson6mo ago

Oh man, my friend once spent an entire evening trying to fix a weird indent. It was because she had a single hidden tab character in her header that messed up the whole document when she saved it as a PDF. She was ready to throw her computer out the window.

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kaimiller6mo ago

Hidden formatting is the worst. I always turn on the show paragraph marks option when something looks off. It reveals tabs, spaces, and extra line breaks. For PDF issues, sometimes saving the file as a plain text .txt first and then copying it back into a fresh document can strip out that junk. It's saved me a few times when nothing else worked.

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skyler_baker5mo ago

Extra spaces and hidden formatting characters are the ultimate resume gremlins. I always keep the paragraph marks turned on because it saves me from that exact headache. @bethjackson know the struggle well - one rogue tab in a header can ruin an entire PDF layout. If you catch it early, just do a ctrl+f search for "space" repeated twice and replace them with a single space. Also worth checking your alignment settings since even a pixel off can mess up the whole look.

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