Concepts

vitakit makes two things from one set of files: an academic website and a typeset CV. A handful of ideas explain how.

Your project

content/              what is about you: entries, prose, publications
schemas/              what your own sections may contain (often none)
app/                  the website: pages, layout, design
cv-tex/               the PDF: documents, styling, templates

It is an ordinary repository you own. vitakit is a package it depends on, plus the vitakit command. Nothing is generated into your files except where a command shows you the change first.

Sections

A section is one list in your CV — education, employment, talks, grants — and one file: content/talks.yml. Each item in the file is an entry:

- date: 2025-03-14
  title: The shape of large random $k$-ary trees
  event: AofA 2025
  kind: invited

Entries are sorted newest first. Five sections are built in (education, employment, teaching, talks, supervision); any other is yours to add.

Schemas

A schema says what a section's entries may contain: which fields, of which types, which ones every entry needs. Every file is checked against its schema, so a typo is an error that names the file, the entry and the field, rather than a line that silently disappears.

Built-in sections have theirs; a section of your own has schemas/<name>.ts, usually drafted from your entries by vitakit add section. A schema decides what is accepted — not what is shown.

Two outputs, composed separately

The website is made of pages. A page is Markdown in content/pages/ for its text and, if it shows sections, a Vue file in app/pages/ that says which, in which order, with which headings:

<VitaSection id="talks" title="Talks" />

The PDF is made of documents. A document is a LaTeX file in cv-tex/ that says the same for the PDF, and an optional .yml that selects entries:

\vitasection[Selected talks]{talks}

The data is shared; the composition is not. A section can be on the website and not in the PDF, on two pages, or in three documents with different selections. Leaving a section out somewhere is a choice, not an error.

Publications

Publications are not a section: they are one BibTeX file, content/publications.bib, as reference managers export it. What a page or a PDF shows of it is a list, declared once in content/publication-lists.yml — recent: { limit: 3 } — and placed like a section: <VitaPublications list="recent" title="Recent publications" />, \vitapublications[Recent publications]{recent}. Both show the same entries, in the same order. See publications.

Visibility

Every entry may say who sees it: public (the default) everywhere, cv only in the PDF, private only in documents that ask for it — an application with referees, say. The website build only ever reads public entries, and pnpm check verifies that nothing else reached it. See privacy.

What decides what

You want to change	In
your entries, prose, publications	content/
what entries of a section may contain	schemas/<section>.ts
which sections a page shows, in which order	app/pages/<page>.vue
how entries look on the website	CSS, or a component of your own
which sections a PDF includes, in which order	cv-tex/<document>.tex
which entries a PDF includes	cv-tex/<document>.yml
which publications a list shows, in what order and groups	content/publication-lists.yml
where a publication list appears, with which heading	the page's <VitaPublications>, the document's \vitapublications
how entries look in the PDF	cv-tex/preamble.tex, or a template of your own

vitakit status shows the whole picture for your project; vitakit explain <section> follows one section through all of it. The tutorial builds a site step by step.