Natascha Awatare

This article provides an introduction to typesetting, and customizing, various types of list in LaTeX:

Typesetting lists is a large topic because LaTeX lists are extremely configurable, enabling creation of an enormous variety of list types and structures. We’ll survey and demonstrate some methods you can use to configure and customize your lists.

Unordered (bulleted) lists are produced by the itemize environment, where each list entry starts by using the \item command, which also generates the bullet symbol.

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Numbered (ordered) lists have the same syntax but use the enumerate environment: each entry must be preceded by the control sequence \item, which will automatically generate numbers to label the item. These numbers start at 1 with every use of the enumerate environment—note that this, default, LaTeX numbering behaviour can be changed/controlled via the enumitem package.

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The following example demonstrates the description environment. The (optional) label for each entry is enclosed in square brackets after the \item command:

We also use the blindtext package to generate some dummy English text in the third entry. To obtain English we need to use the babel package with the language option [english]:

Here is the example:

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As shown in the description environment example, the \item command takes an optional parameter, in square brackets. You can use this feature within itemize and enumerate environments to change the default label of individual entries in your list:

The label text will be used to produce the label for this entry.

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In LaTeX you can insert a list inside another list. The above list types may be included within one another, either mixed or of one type, to a depth of 4 levels.

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The label style of nested list entries changes according to its depth in the list. For nested itemize lists the bullet type changes; for enumerate lists the number format changes with increasing depth of entry. Both are limited to a depth of 4 levels.

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The bullet style changes depending on the depth of the nested lists:

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LaTeX’s lists are highly configurable, providing plenty of scope for the creation of many different types of customized list. You can either make direct modifications to LaTeX’s standard list types or, preferably, use the highly versatile enumitem package to do it for you.

CTAN hosts a number of list-related packages which may be worth investigating if you have particular customization requirements. In addition, tex.stackexchange provides a wealth of list-related questions with answers that provide useful insights and great examples!

We’ll start with some examples which modify list labels then move on to customization of list layouts.

Firstly, we show how to change list labelling without using the enumitem package.

Custom lists can be produced by using the enumitem package or direct modification of the standard lists. Here, we’ll give a summary of some standard LaTeX commands, counter variables and list parameters that you may need to be aware of.

The following table shows the LaTeX commands used for label-generation at each level of the itemize and enumerate list environments:

The enumerate list environment also uses four counter variables which keep track of the current label value for each level:

You can configure LaTeX’s standard labelling by using \renewcommand to redefine the label-generating commands and, for the enumerate environment, you can also use the appropriate counter variable.

Here are some examples which do this without using the enumitem package.

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In the previous example, the command \arabic was used to typeset the current value of various label counter variables. Note that “Arabic numerals”, and use of the command \arabic, refers to the digits 0 to 9: see this Arabic numerals article on Wikipedia for further background.

In general, a counter variable can be printed in various formats by using one of the following 5 commands:

For example:

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This example typesets emoji using an OpenType colour font so it will only work in LuaLaTeX. See the Overleaf article An overview of technologies supporting the use of colour emoji fonts in LaTeX for more information on typesetting emoji.

Although this a just a fun example, using LuaLaTeX, it demonstrates customizing all four label-generation commands, and using the label-counter variables, to create some unusual labelling... Click the “Open in Overleaf” link to see the full code.

To see the full code, open this LuaLaTeX example in Overleaf.

This example produces the following output

In addition to customizing labels, it is possible to modify list spacing and layout, but first we need to know the various LaTeX parameters which determine typesetting and layout of lists.

You can use the layouts package to generate a diagram which displays the LaTeX list parameters:

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The meaning of these parameters is described in the list section of the LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual so we won’t reproduce it here.

LaTeX provides the generic list environment which provides a framework for creating your own list type(s). Using the information contained in the diagram above, the following example is a slightly modified version of one contained in the list section of the LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual

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The enumitem package is the recommended method for modifying standard LaTeX lists or creating your own custom list formats. enumitem provides a wealth of features so we can’t cover all of them but we can provide a few basic examples to help get you get started. Anyone wishing to explore this versatile package in more depth is strongly encouraged to browse tex.stackexchange for questions, answers (and examples) relating to the enumitem package, and to read the package documentation.

The enumitem provides an optional configuration parameter called shortlabels which you use via

The shortlabels option mimics the behaviour of the enumerate package, providing a concise method for defining the numbering scheme of enumerate environments. See the enumerate package documentation for further information.

With reference to the LaTeX parameters diagram we can use enumitem to easily customize a standard LaTeX list, such as itemize:

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This example produces the following output:

To create a new list type with enumitem you use the \newlist command which requires 3 arguments:

After you have created the new list you can configure it with the \setlist command.

In this example we’ll create a new list called myitems which is based on enumerate. We’ll set max-depth to 3:

A minimum requirement is using the \setlist command to define labels for this custom list. One way to do that, for enumerate-based lists, is to use the counter variables created by the enumitem package—those counter variables use the name of your list: myitems in our example.

Here is how we use the corresponding counter variables within our label configuration:

If we had more than 3 levels, the corresponding counter variables would be called myitemsiv (level 4), myitemsv (level 5) and so forth, continuing the use of lower-case Roman numerals.

In addition to the labels, we’ll also set some values for leftmargin and rightmargin (see the LaTeX parameters diagram).

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This example produces the following output:

The enumitem package lets you create lists which can be nested to an arbitrary depth, removing LaTeX’s limit of 4. Anyone preparing contracts with complex (deeply nested) clause structures might benefit from this, although the nested code does look a little intimidating...

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This example produces the following output:

The following examples only work with LuaLaTeX and are designed to give a suggestion of some possibilities—of course, substitute MetaPost with your preferred drawing application/tool!

These examples use the luamplib package and also demonstrate expandable commands, such as \the and \directlua, can be used within the MetaPost code.

This example produces bullet points that reduce in size as the list depth increases. Click on the “Open in Overleaf” link to run the example and view the full code.

To see the full code, open this LuaLaTeX example in Overleaf.

This example produces the following output:

This example was inspired by an example on tex.stackexchange which Overleaf has modified to create custom bullets using MetaPost code. Click on the “Open in Overleaf” link to run the example and view the full code.

To see the full code, open this LuaLaTeX example in Overleaf.

This example produces the following output:

The 2002 Winter Olympics , officially the XIX Olympic Winter Games and commonly known as Salt Lake 2002, was an international winter

With the proportion of databases that are being leaked, it is very likely that sooner or later we will find someone trying to access our sum from one of the most popular platforms and, furthermore, if we have used insecure password practices for years, depending on weak and reused passwords on other websites, they will probably even succeed without too much difficulty, and may put your data at risk.

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The new password is eight characters in length and has upper and lower case symbols.

We will have a new password for the service in a few seconds.

We will have access to our main panel once we log in.

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We can find other options in our account settings.

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We eliminate artifacts that we don't use. We were able to proceed a little further after the Evernote sum was protected.

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When you start the session, the system will send a password by email or phone to you, so that you can't access the platform.

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We were able to stop anyone from accessing our data if we didn't use the service, but we had to remember that this would destroy all the information we have saved on the platform.