pdflatex

You are talking about pdflatex, which is the default latex compiler in many LaTeX distributions.

> pdflatex && pdflatex && bibtex && pdflatex latexmk.

If it was passed through pdflatex these days, it'd look much better.

If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right?

It's also worth noting that you can use accented characters with pdflatex: adding \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} at the top of your preamble will usually do the job.

Some people are just used to using their existing document processing pipelines rather than using more modern tools like pdflatex, I guess.

Free, open source, integrates with MikTex, ctrl-space autocompletion for bibtex entries, can easily switch build chain from latex-dvi-ps-pdf to xelatex-pdf or pdflatex or latex-dvipdf.

It doesn't improve on compile time because it just runs pdflatex behind the scenes, but I find it usable when designing figures using tikz.

Even moving.tex documents over different platforms is an enormous pain, and pdflatex/xelatex don't possess the error reporting you need to quickly find which packages are missing on which systems.

And it's actually several typesetting programs: TeX, LaTeX, PdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX...

My guess is that it was turned into a PDF directly from a TeX DVI file with bitmap fonts rather than compiled directly into a PDF using outline fonts with pdflatex.

+1 i have given the user to opt for WriteLatex (which i found so awesome) if pdflatex or moderncv is not found on the machine.

Pdflatex is a rewrite that compiles directly to PDF.