Changing the Dimensions of a List in LaTeX
Latex provides a large number of commands for the creation of structured documents. The filosophy of latex is that, once the user determines the content, the formatting engine should be responsible for the real appearence of the resulting page.
The goal of this philosophy is to provide freedom for writers, so they don't need to be concerned about formatting choices. This idea is called what-you-see-is-what-you-mean, in contrast to the WYSIWYG strategy that is used in most products in the market, including of course Microsoft Word.
Fixed Formatting
However, there are situations that even in latex the user may need to provide his or her own formatting. These situations may appear from time to time when creating specific documents, such as a dissertation or thesis.
In these cases, the advantage of latex is that it provides a very strict control on how the page is defined and, using the underlying TeX capabilities, one can create very complex document.
In this article we will show, for example, how one can format lists so that they can have non-standard appearence. This way, an author can adapt the appearence of a list to the specific context in which it is needed.
Measurements and Spaces
The way latex allows lists to be customized is through a set of measurement commands. From the standard latex documentation, we have the following set of of dimension paramenters:
- \topsep: amount of extra vertical space at top of list
- \partopsep: extra length at top if environment is prececed by a blank line (it should be a rubber length)
- \itemsep: amount of extra vertical space between items
- \parsep: amount of vertical space between paragraphs" within an item
- \leftmargin: horizontal distance between the left margins of the environment and the list; must be nonnegative
- \rightmargin: horizontal distance betwen the right margins of the enviroment and the list; must be nonnegative
- \listparindent: amount of extra space for paragraph indent after the first in an item; can be negative
- \itemindent: indentation of first line of an item; can be negative
- \labelsep: separation between end of the box containing the label and the text of the first line of an item
- \labelwidth: normal width of the box containing the label; if the actual label is bigger, the natural width is used, extending into the space for the first line of the item's text
To use one of these commands, the easiest thing to do is to use a command such as \setlength to determine the length for each of these parameters. For example:
\setlength{\itemident}{1cm}
will change to one centimeter the amount of identation for each item of a list.
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