Inline lists in LaTeX using paralist

11 Comments

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)

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}

 

Inline itemize (inparaitem)

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}

 

Inline description (inparadesc)

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}

According to the author, the last environment was added for completeness rather than usefulness.

11 Comments

  1. 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.

    Reply

  2. Colby

    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.

    Reply

    • I agree, inparaenum is 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.

      Reply

  3. 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

    Reply

  4. Tal

    Thanks for the great blog.
    I wanted to know how i can generate a custom label (say AI# for Action item) and an automatic counter that would increase the AI# while i write the document and point out the action items along the text (over a few pages).
    the result would be:

    bla bla bla kejflksjfdl AI#1 do somthing. fdjfgnkjsdnfkgjnskjdfngkjsndfgjs and dlksjkfjsdkf.
    ~~~ more text~~~
    lkjlekrtjlkre dfg fgdg AI#2 do somthing else dkfglkdfj.

    etc.
    I would also like to be able to cross reference to a specific AI#.

    Thanks in advance!

    Reply

    • Hi Tal,

      Try the code below and let me know if you have any question.

      Cheers, Tom.

      \documentclass[11pt]{article}

\newcounter{aitem}
\newcommand*\ai[2]{%
\refstepcounter{aitem}
\label{#1}
AI\#\theaitem{} #2}

\begin{document}

bla bla bla kejflksjfdl \ai{ai_1}{do something}. fdjfgnkjsdnfkgjnskjdfngkjsndfgjs and dlksjkfjsdkf.
more text
lkjlekrtjlkre dfg fgdg \ai{ai_2}{do something} else dkfglkdfj.

Reference to first and second AIs: \ref{ai_1}, \ref{ai_2}.

\end{document}
      Reply

  5. JEAN

    I would like to use inparaitem in beamer. But it is saying this Environment is undefined. Is there a Environment for the beamer class?
    Thx

    Reply

    • tom

      Hi Jean,

      Thanks for your comment. Could it be that you didn’t load the package?

      \usepackage{paralist}

      That said, beamer doesn’t work with paralist as that package overwrites the beamer list definitions. Here’s a possible work-around.

      Best, Tom

      Reply

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