Semantic Markup with Docutils Interpreted Text Roles

A resume is a slippery thing -- a package of semi-structured data.

It has a kind of database-like feel to it, but there are so many exceptions and special cases that the database never works out quite the way you wanted.

For example, I've got -- essentially -- one employer over the past 30+ years.  But I've been on hundreds of projects for almost 100 different clients.  Since projects overlap, there's no tidy timeline.  The database has a token "Employer" table, a "Client" table, a "Project", which is an association between "Client" and "Employer".  For each "Project" I can have a number of roles or positions.  Most importantly, each project has a large number of hardware, software, skill, language and other "features" to it.

Relax

A more relaxed model is some kind of markup so that keywords can be identified semantically and culled out to create tag clouds or indices.

The usual culprit for mixed-content models like this is XML.  We would define a DTD or XSD with our tags in a new namespace.  Sadly, this also means that I have to rewrite my resume into XML.  Not that bad, but still...

Can we do similarly detailed semantic markup in RST?

What Role Does These Words Play?

RST offers a flexible mechanism they called Interpreted Text Roles.  There are two parts to getting started with this.

1.  Name the role in a .. role:: name directive.

2.  Markup your content with :name:`words`.  

By default, the role name is the class name that will be put into the HTML <span> tag when the document is written in HTML.  If you want, you can supply special formatting in addition to marking the words with a role.

You can do considerably more with interpreted roles, but we'll look at creating a tag cloud.

Gathering Data

The gathering part is easy.  You can snarf out the interpreted text roles with a simple visitor-based design.

import sys
from collections import defaultdict
from docutils.core import publish_doctree
from docutils.nodes import SparseNodeVisitor

class RoleVisitor( SparseNodeVisitor ):
    def __init__( self, role="skill", *args, **kw ):
        SparseNodeVisitor.__init__( self, *args, **kw )
        self.role= role
        self.cloud = defaultdict(int)
    def visit_inline( self, aNode ):
        if self.role in aNode['classes']:
            self.cloud[ aNode.astext() ] += 1

This visitor will accumulate a map with tag and frequency for a given role.

We can parse the RST resume file and accumulate the tag cloud statistics as follows.

def tagFreq( aFile ):

    source= aFile.read()

    structure= publish_doctree( source )




    skills= RoleVisitor( "skill", structure)




    structure.walkabout(skills)


    return skills.cloud

Once we have the data we can emit a tag cloud.

Frequency to Font Size

Converting frequencies to font sizes is a little alignment exercise.   A clever page designer might have clever style names based on the tag frequency.  I decided to name the styles after the font-sizes, since that seems simple.

def sizeMap( cloud ):

    """Many common tags piled into xx-large."""

    size_name = [ 'xx-small', 'x-small', 'small', 'medium', 'large',

         'x-large', 'xx-large' ]

    freq=list(set(cloud.values()))

    offset = max( 0, (len(size_name)-len(freq))//2 )

    size_map= {}

    for sz, f in enumerate(sorted(freq)):

        size_map[f]= size_name[sz+offset] if sz <>

    #print size

    return size_name, size_map

This assigns all the words that occur just once to the smallest font.  There are usually a large number of tags that occur just once.  A few tags will have a large number of occurrences; these will all wind up with 'xx-large' as their class.

Emitting The Cloud

Writing the tag cloud (in RST) looks this this.

def rst( names, sizes, cloud, destination ):

    sys.stdout= destination

    for s in names:

        print "..  role::", s # The formatting roles that match our CSS.

    print "\n----------\n"

    for k in sorted(cloud):

        print ':%s:`%s`' % ( sizes[cloud[k]], k, )

We can then tack this cloud onto the end of the resume to get a summary of skills, frameworks, OS's, languages and the like.

Style Points

The docutils section on overriding the style sheet suggests we include something like the following in the working directory.

resume.css

@import url(html4css1.css);




span.xx-small { font-size:0.65em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.x-small { font-size:0.7em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.small { font-size:0.85em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.medium { font-size:1em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.large { font-size:1.3em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.x-large { font-size:1.6em; font-family:sans-serif }

span.xx-large { font-size:1.9em; font-family:sans-serif }

We include this with the following command: rst2html.py --stylesheet-path=resume.css

Workflow

This makes it much more pleasant to edit my resume.  

1.  Make the changes.

2.  Run the tag-cloud script.

3.  Run rst2html. 

Now I just have to remember to do it more often than once every five years.