Multiple Line Text Box

Question

Given the many similar questions on TeX.SE, my desired answer may be somewhere else on this site, but I have not been able to find it -- apologies if this is a duplicate!

I am writing the following in my document.

In this section, we introduce the concept of \textit{information percolation}, as introduced by Lubetzky and Sly.
The rough idea will be to separate the state space in `clusters', which will then be coloured \RED, \BLUE\ or \GREEN (at time $t$) according to the following (rough) conditions:

\smallskip

\noindent%
\parbox{2em}{\raggedleft\bcdot\,}
\parbox{\linewidth-2em}{%
    the \RED\ clusters will be the vertices whose states depend on the initial configuration;}

\noindent%
\parbox{2em}{\raggedleft\bcdot\,}
\parbox{\linewidth-2em}{%
    the \BLUE\ clusters will be singletons with votes that are iid $\Unif([q])$ random variables;}

\noindent%
\parbox{2em}{\raggedleft\bcdot\,}
\parbox{\linewidth-2em}{%
    the \GREEN\ clusters will be independent of the initial state, but have highly nontrivial dependencies inside the clusters -- it is the green clusters that embody the complicated correlation-nature of the voting model.}

\smallskip

A formal definition is forthcoming.

Here \bcdot is simply \ensuremath{\bm{\cdot}}, using the 'bold maths' package \bm. This gives the following output.

This is in essence my version of an \itemise, use with spacing that I prefer. However, as you may have noticed, there are a few issues:

• the spacing between the second and third lines is too small;
• (most importantly) the bullet is in the centre of the three lines (horizontally), instead of inline with the top one.

How can I fix these two? -- namely, get the spacing unified and get the bullet on the top line?

Answer 1

I was actually able to solve my own question by using the enumitem package. The following is a MWE for this. Since I used this on a number of occasions throughout my paper, I made a new environment for it.

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{enumitem}

\newenvironment{itemise}%
{\begin{itemize}[noitemsep,topsep=\smallskipamount,label={\textnormal{CUSTOM}}]}
{\end{itemize}}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemise}
    \item item 1
    \item item 2
\end{itemise}

\end{document}

Of course, one can change the label to be whatever is desired.

This TeX.SE question is helpful for understanding enumitem: \topsep, \itemsep, \partopsep and \parsep - what does each of them mean (and what about the bottom)?.