"On The Other Claw...."

   Well, if I may offer what little advice I've found to work from my own shattered career search... One thing that's important to remember about a resume is that its purpose isn't to get you a job, it's to get you an interview. The difference may not seem like much but it can help you focus on what you really ought to have in there- and what you can leave to an interview. And it's in the interview that you try to reel the job in. The resume is just casting out the hook.
   On the subject of wildly unusual resumes, I guess that depends on the place you're sending it to. It's true that most places of any size will just feed it into some kind of text database anyway so presentation may not matter except as a hinderance to OCR systems. This is also why many places insist on MS Word format for digital submissions I guess- easier for the drones to know how to handle (how you can not know how to open a plain text file is beyond me, but then I've found out that many idiots savants in computers think "plain text" means "MS Word in Times New Roman with no graphics" rather than "ASCII"... but that's a whole other discussion...). Then again, some places may value someone who thinks out of the box- depends on the place and what job you're going for. Research into the company can be key here. It was right about a year ago that I submitted that resume for a Perl programming job at a graphics printing place- submitted in the form of a program that, when run, printed out a formatted resume of the more traditional variety. In the end, as you may recall, the job turned out to have somewhat different responsibilities than what they'd advertised and I wasn't as qualified as I'd hoped... But that unusual resume did get me an interview, with extreme prejudice.
   For PDFing things, OpenOffice's Unix ports can generally output most documents to PDF and PostScript formats, so I do that when I need PDF sometimes. I presume that the Windows version has the same capabilities.