The paralist package implements the three standard lists: itemize, enumerate and description for usage within paragraphs. In other words, the package provides a way to create inline lists placed within normal text.
Besides the inline environments for the standard lists, the package also provides support to format the labels (bullets, numbering, etc.). However, for labeling and formatting of lists in general, I recommend the more powerful enumitem package. Please, see the paralist package documentation for more details on the functionality provided by the package.
The code for inline lists is straight forward and resamples the way standard lists are created. Therefore, I only posted one minimal working example for each environment below, without further explanations.
For more details on the standard list environments see this post and sample code here.
Inline enumerate (inparaenum)
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{paralist}
\begin{document}
This includes:
\begin{inparaenum}[1)]
\item first task,
\item second task and
\item third task
\end{inparaenum}
to be completed by the end of the month.
\end{document}
Open code in writeLaTeX.
Inline itemize (inparaitem)
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{paralist}
\begin{document}
This includes:
\begin{inparaitem}
\item first task,
\item second task and
\item third task
\end{inparaitem}
to be completed by the end of the month.
\end{document}
Open code in writeLaTeX.
Inline description (inparadesc)
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{paralist}
\begin{document}
This includes:
\begin{inparadesc}
\item[Task] first task,
\item[Task] second task and
\item[Task] third task
\end{inparadesc}
to be completed by the end of the month.
\end{document}
Open code in writeLaTeX.
According to the author, the last environment was added for completeness rather than usefulness.
If you do have any better idea than my brainless repetition of the same code, please let me know below!
You might have wondered about the link “Open code in writeLaTeX”. I am testing a collaboration with the folks over at writeLaTeX. The idea is to provide the possibility to open the code with one click in the browser, play with the examples and see the result right away. Let me know whether you find this useful!



February 1st, 2013 at 8:15 am
Thanks a lot for this. I have often wanted to do this, but had to do it by hand, which yielded formats and spacing that weren’t right. That’s great.
February 1st, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Thanks for the feedback, appreciate it!
February 1st, 2013 at 3:35 pm
I definitely appreciate the writeLaTeX functionality, thanks!
I can’t think of any real uses for inparaitem and inparadesc, but would be interested if someone came up with anything. If there are enough good examples, I would appreciate another post on it. I think it would be worth it just to get some examples web searchable.
February 1st, 2013 at 3:58 pm
I agree,
inparaenumis the only environment I’ve been using so far. If something comes to my mind, I’ll definitely add it to the post. Thanks for the feedback! Cheers, Tom.February 4th, 2013 at 8:18 am
Hi Tom,
Good to see the “Open in writeLaTeX” links in action – and thanks for the feedback you gave when we were trying to get them to work on a wordpress site!
On the inline lists, I can definitely see cases where the inline enumerate option will be useful, it’s a nice tip on how to do it, thanks!
Best,
John
February 6th, 2013 at 2:29 am
Thanks for the feedback John! Appreciate it. Tom