`normalize_text()` folded whitespace only, so `--contains` compared what a
user types against what LaTeX renders. The stock CV compiled with the
documented lualatex command turns `'` into U+2019 and `--` into U+2013, so
`--contains "Master's degree"` and `--contains "2016-2024"` both reported
the keyword missing from a document that plainly contains it, through both
extractors. The documented remedy for a missing keyword is to add it, which
is the one thing the ATS section forbids.
Fold both sides at comparison time: NFC, then curly apostrophes and quotes
to ASCII, en/em dashes to `-`, no-break space to space. `--dump-text` still
writes the raw layer - that is what an ATS parses, and the date-range rule
in 05-cv-templates.md needs the raw en-dash visible there.
Separately, pdflatex without T1 font encoding stores accents decomposed
(`e` + U+0300). NFC repairs the pdftotext side of that, but pypdf reads the
same layer as `Z¨ urich` with a spacing accent, which no fold recovers.
moderncv 2.5 loads T1 itself under pdflatex; the apt-packaged 2.3.1 does
not - reproduced by compiling the template against moderncv v2.3.1 with
pdflatex (before: U+0308/U+0300 in pdftotext, `Z¨ urich` in pypdf; after:
U+00FC/U+00E8 in both). The template and the guide's preamble gain
`\ifpdftex\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}\fi`; the lualatex text layer is
byte-identical before and after.
Tests: ten new cases in test_verify_pdf.py (the fold-through and
normalize_text ones fail on the whitespace-only code) and a
test_latex_guidance.py guard that the fontenc line exists and stays inside
the pdflatex branch. framework_version 1.4.3 -> 1.4.4 on 05-cv-templates.md.
Reported and diagnosed by 9scorp4 in Discussions #385 and #384.
Three findings from the 2026-08-19 review (F9, F31, F34):
- F9: every placeholder bullet written as \item [text] let LaTeX parse
the bracketed text as the item's optional label, rendering it clipped
off the left page edge and absent from the PDF text layer ("Achievement"
appeared 9 times in cv/main_example.tex and 0 times in the extraction,
with a clean compile and green CI). Bullets are now braced as
\item {[text]} in the example CV and in the template
06-cover-letter-templates.md teaches, and CI's stock PDF assertions
additionally require "Achievement" to survive pdftotext.
- F31: 05-cv-templates.md gains a "LaTeX Special Characters" section and
06's is completed beyond \_ and \&. The load-bearing case is an
unescaped % in a quantified achievement bullet: it starts a LaTeX
comment and silently deletes the rest of the line from the PDF.
- F34: the documented ATS extraction commands (apply.md,
05-cv-templates.md, CLAUDE.md) now carry -enc UTF-8. Xpdf-based
pdftotext builds default to Latin-1 output, so a correct non-ASCII CV
failed the replacement-character parseability check.
framework_version: 05-cv-templates.md 1.4.1 -> 1.4.2,
06-cover-letter-templates.md 1.0.1 -> 1.0.2. All three pinned by the new
tests/test_latex_guidance.py (9 tests; suite now 261).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ayobami Adegoke