Vertical alignment of tikzpicture with text?

Question

I have some text, and a corresponding tikzpicture, both of which are to be part of a test question, and which are thus included as part of an \item in an enumerate environment.

Like this:

\item 
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.55\linewidth}  
    description of question  
\end{minipage}  
\hspace*{1cm}  
\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.35\linewidth}  
   \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.3]  
    question diagram  
  \end{tikzpicture}  
\end{minipage}  

What I want is for the text to be vertically aligned as it would be without a minipage environment, and for the top of the tikzpicture to be aligned with the top of the text.

I can obtain this alignment with the option "baseline=4cm" in tikzpicture, but this has the result of putting in a large amount of vertical white space before the item, which then has to be countered with \vspace*{-2cm}.

Is there a better, automatic, way rather than fiddling with vertical space?

Answer 1

It is a generic trick, to add a \vspace{0pt} at the beginning of the minipage environment. For example:

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.55\linewidth}  
\vspace{0pt}
    description of question  
\end{minipage}  
\hspace*{1cm}  
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.35\linewidth}  
\vspace{0pt}
   \begin{tikzpicture}
    \draw circle (1cm);
  \end{tikzpicture}  
\end{minipage}