The Jakes Resume Template Is Good. Here Is the Catch.

The Jakes resume template is good; keep it, but fix one thing. Your section headings use letter-spacing wide enough to turn EDUCATION into E D U C A T I O N inside a text extractor. That single LaTeX property is the catch — everything else the template gives you works. Single column with clean date formatting; no visual noise. The problem lives in your .tex file, and you can fix it in under a minute.

That number — 0.6 px — is the boundary. Below it, your heading holds together as a single word. Above it, the heading shatters into isolated characters. The default tracking in the Jakes template sits above that line.

If you grabbed a fork or a modified copy from GitHub, the same issue applies. Any Overleaf copy that kept the original heading styles carries the same tracking values. Check your headings regardless of where your copy came from.

What the Jakes resume gets right

Start with what works. The template gives you one column, read top to bottom, with no ambiguity about reading order. No photo or sidebar; no tables or colored backgrounds. The white space between sections lets you scan each block on its own, and you never have to guess where to look next.

Dates are handled well. Each role lines up a title and company name beside a date range on one line. If you have seen the Harvard resume format, the Jakes template is a close cousin: different typeface, same underlying shape.

None of that depends on LaTeX. You could build the same layout in Word or Google Docs and your file would read identically. The single column and clean hierarchy do the work, not the compiler.

Your bullet points benefit from the same discipline. Start each one with a verb and keep it to two lines or fewer. A number anchors the impact when you have one to give.

Cut onboarding from 12 days to 4 by rewriting the setup documentation
Migrated 850 customer records to the new CRM without downtime

Wide tracking breaks your headings silently

The template sets its section headings in small caps with generous tracking. Each letter is pushed apart from its neighbor for visual emphasis. On your screen, the result looks deliberate and clean. The trouble starts when software pulls that text back out of your exported PDF.

Past the threshold, a text extraction tool stops grouping characters into words. Your heading becomes a row of isolated letters — and you cannot tell from the PDF that anything has changed. There is no gradual degradation; the extractor either groups the letters or it does not.

Body text in the template uses normal letter-spacing, so your bullet points come through cleanly. You do not need to audit every line. Fix the headings where tracking was widened for style.

Same PDF, different text

WORK EXPERIENCE

W O R K   E X P E R I E N C E

Same file, same heading, two outputs. The extraction tool on macOS tolerated the wider tracking in our test; the same tool on Linux did not. You changed nothing between those two runs. The software changed, and your result changed with it.

This reframes the problem. You are not chasing a score — you are trying to keep your file legible to a tool you cannot choose and cannot see. Stay well inside the safe range; give yourself margin.

Your PDF will be opened by software you did not install, on a machine you have never seen. You do not get to pick the extraction tool or the operating system underneath it. The only variable you control is the file itself. When your heading text is tightly spaced, there is nothing left to misread.

Fix the tracking in your .cls file

Small caps are safe on their own; the issue is wide tracking layered on top. Dial it back and your heading holds.

• Open your .cls file (or .tex file if you styled headings there) and search for \textls or \letterspace.
• Reduce the tracking value toward zero. A small amount of spread may still be safe, but test after every edit.
• Keep \textsc if you like the small-cap look — that command is not the problem.
• Re-export your PDF and run the paste test described below.

If you are editing on Overleaf, the same fix applies. Open the .cls file in your project and reduce the tracking value. Export a fresh PDF and test right away.

You might want to adjust font sizes or margins while you have the file open. Those changes are fine as long as you keep the single-column structure. If you add a custom section (Publications, Certifications), style it with small caps and minimal letter-spacing, the same as the rest.

Run the paste test

Open your exported PDF in any reader. Select all text and paste it into a plain-text window — Notes on a Mac, Notepad on Windows. What you see there is close to what a text extractor sees in your file.

Look at your section headings. Do you see WORK EXPERIENCE as two whole words, or as a string of isolated letters? Run this check after every change to your heading styles. If the headings paste as intact words, you are fine. If they shatter, reduce the spacing and re-export.

The paste test is not a guarantee. It is a sanity check: if your own system splits the heading into isolated letters, the spacing is too wide. If your headings survive the paste, you have done what you can on your end.

EDUCATION
WORK EXPERIENCE
PROJECTS

Is the Jakes resume worth keeping?

Yes. The bones are right, and right bones are the hardest part to get on your own. A single-column layout with consistent date formatting and no visual clutter is what you should build toward. The Jakes template gives you that from the first compile. Fix the heading tracking and run the paste test; after that, your file does its job.

If you are comfortable in LaTeX, keep using it. Watch your headings and test after every export; beyond that, you are set. If you are not comfortable in LaTeX, do not learn it for this one template. You gain nothing a .docx cannot give you, and you take on a toolchain that resists small edits. Your time is better spent on what your resume says than on how it compiles.

A single-column layout like the classic template gives you the same structure without the letter-spacing trap. The design that gets read is the one where nothing on the page works against you. Fix one setting and run the paste test — your Jakes resume is ready to send.