How to remove indents for the initial list but indent all nested lists?

Question

I'm trying to use enumitem to modify my lists so that they're flush to the left side of the paper but so that any nested lists are properly indented.

This is what I've tried:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
    \usepackage{enumitem}
    \setlist{nolistsep}
    \newenvironment{notes}
        {\begin{itemize}[label=,leftmargin=0em,labelindent=1cm]\ignorespaces}
        {\end{itemize}\ignorespacesafterend}

\begin{document}
\begin{notes}
    \item item 1
    \item item 2
        \begin{notes}
            \item item 2.a
            \item item 2.b
        \end{notes}
\end{notes}

\end{document}

It ends up looking like this:

item 1
item 2
item 2.a
item 2.b

How can I modify it so it looks like this?

item 1
item 2
    item 2.a
    item 2.b

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 04 '12 at 18:35

2

You can us adjust the \leftmargin once you are inside the notes list:

    \newcommand{\LeftMargin}{0em}%
    \newenvironment{notes}{%
         \begin{itemize}[label=,leftmargin=\LeftMargin,labelindent=1cm]%
          \renewcommand*{\LeftMargin}{1cm}%
          \ignorespaces%
    }{%
        \end{itemize}%
        \ignorespacesafterend%
    }

answered Nov 04 '12 at 18:35

Peter Grill

223,288

Thanks, this worked perfectly. Just out of curiosity, why do you append the % symbol to the end of each of your lines? – Michael0x2a Nov 04 '12 at 18:42
@Michael0x2a: The percent signs here are intended to suppress a spurious space in the output. I learned the hard way as per Tex Capacity Exceeded (if remove % after use of macro), so I tend to add them always. BUT, before you start doing that you should also see When is it harmful to add percent character at end of lines in a \newcommand, or similar as there are cases where you don't want to do that. – Peter Grill Nov 04 '12 at 18:47

How to remove indents for the initial list but indent all nested lists?

1 Answers1