How We Test Our PDFs for ATS Readability

A PDF is a set of drawing instructions. Two files can look identical on screen while one contains real characters and the other contains shapes, an image, or glyphs with no mapping back to letters. A human reader cannot tell the difference; a parser can. That is the gap this test closes.

ATS vendors describe the same failure points. Greenhouse's help article on unsuccessful resume parsing lists "Resumes that include graphics, photos, or word art", "Complex resumes with tables, headers, and footers", resumes uploaded "as an image, rather than a document", files larger than 2.5 MB, and "A resume with spaces between the letters." Its candidate FAQ recommends: "Upload a PDF for best results." Our templates are designed around that list, and the test checks the parts of it that can be measured automatically.

1. Build a test document. We start from the fictional example resume and add hard cases: the accented name above, a headline with <script> in it, a skill written as "C++ & <b>HTML</b>", a current job (so the date reads "Present"), and links for email and a profile URL.
2. Export with the real engine. The test calls the same layout and PDF code the editor uses in your browser (pdf-lib with fontkit), once for each free template: Clean, Harvard and Compact.
3. Extract with pdf.js. Mozilla's PDF reader library pulls the text from every page. We compare it with the input, string by string.
4. Extract again with pdftotext. A second, unrelated extractor from the Xpdf tools reads the same file, so a quirk in one library cannot hide a problem.
5. Check section order. The positions of Summary, Work Experience, Education, Skills and Certifications in the extracted text must be strictly increasing.
6. Inspect the file structure. Each embedded font must be present (a FontFile2 entry) with a ToUnicode map, which is what lets any reader turn glyphs back into letters. Links must be real URI annotations. Resume mode must contain no image objects at all.
7. Check size and pages. A two-page resume must stay under 500 KB, well below the 2.5 MB parsing limit Greenhouse documents, and text must continue correctly onto page two.

These checks are part of the project's automated test suite, which has to pass before a release, and they run again whenever a template or the layout engine changes.

• One column. Text is placed in a single reading order, top to bottom, so extraction order equals visual order.
• Standard headings. Defaults such as Work Experience, Education and Skills are words tracking systems commonly map to fields. The ATS basics check in the editor warns when you rename a section to something unusual.
• No tables, text boxes or icons in place of words. Dates sit on the same line as the job title as plain text, not in a separate column.
• Nothing in page headers or footers. Your name and contact details are part of the body text on page one.
• Embedded, open-licence fonts. Albert Sans, Sora, Petrona and IBM Plex Sans Condensed are embedded as subsets, so the file renders and extracts the same on any computer.
• Ligatures off. Letter pairs such as "fi" are kept as separate characters, so a word like "office" is never stored as a special combined glyph.

We want to be precise here, because "ATS-proof" claims are common and rarely backed up.

• We do not run commercial ATS software. We have not uploaded test files into Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS or any other vendor's product, and we do not have access to how they rank candidates.
• Readable is not the same as shortlisted. Ranking depends on the employer's settings, the job, and your content. A perfectly parsed resume can still be a weak match.
• Your edits matter. If you rename every heading or paste text full of unusual symbols, the file is still text, but a parser may map it less reliably. The editor's ATS basics check flags the common cases.
• Browsers differ slightly. The PDF is generated in your browser. Our automated tests run in Node.js and Chromium-based browsers; other browsers use the same code path, but we record them honestly as tested by emulation where we have no physical device.

That is why the product copy says ATS-friendly and never "guaranteed to pass".

You do not need special software to repeat the core of our test on your own file, whichever tool made it:

1. Open the PDF in a browser or PDF reader and press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac), then copy.
2. Paste into a plain text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit.
3. Read it top to bottom. Your name, contact details, every heading, every job and every date should be there, in order, with accents intact and no words split into single letters.
4. Search the PDF (Ctrl+F) for your email address. If the search finds nothing, the address is probably part of an image.

If something is missing in the pasted text, a tracking system is likely to miss it too. You can also export a .txt copy from our editor to see exactly what text the PDF contains.

This page is about the file format, which we control. The ATS basics check in the editor is about your content, which you control. It gives a score from 0 to 100 based on contact details, standard headings, complete and consistent dates, length, bullet quality, optional keyword match with a pasted job ad, and whether every character can be drawn by the embedded fonts. It runs in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded. Learn more about content on the ATS-friendly resume guide, or start in the resume builder or CV maker.