Line spacing with mixed font sizes in itemize environment

Question

I'd like to mix in footnote-sized text with normal-sized text in beamer. The problem is that when I use \footnotesize the line spacing still corresponds to \normalsize spacing. Here's a minimal sample document demonstrating the problem:

\documentclass{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{Line spacing for footnote-sized text in itemize environment}
Problem: footnote-sized text still has normal-sized line spacing.
    \begin{itemize}
    \item The problem is below:\\    
 \footnotesize This is some footnote-sized text. When it wraps around it still has normal-sized line spacing.
 \normalsize
    \item Some other items for comparison
    \item I would like the footnote-sized text to have single spacing relative to the footnote size. 
    \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

I was hoping to use the footnote-sized text to write parenthetical comments in a way which visually distinguishes them from the main items in the list.

Answer 1

\documentclass{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{Line spacing for footnote-sized text in itemize environment}
Problem: footnote-sized text still has normal-sized line spacing.
    \begin{itemize}
    \item The problem is below:

    {\footnotesize This is some footnote-sized text.
When it wraps around it still has normal-sized line spacing.\par}

    \item Some other items for comparison
    \item I would like the footnote-sized text to have single spacing relative to the footnote size.
    \end{itemize}

    {\footnotesize This is some footnote-sized text.
When it wraps around it still has normal-sized line spacing.\par}

\end{frame}
\end{document}

When a font size changing command is issued, a \par (or an empty line) before the end of the text should be used.

Answer 2

I fiddled a little big and am not exactly happy but can share what I found. I tried the following:

\item The problem is below:\\
\begin{spacing}{0}
\footnotesize This is some footnote-sized text. When it wraps around it
still has normal-sized line spacing.
\end{spacing}

This worked okay. I assumed I'd just need to fiddle with the number argument of the spacing environment, but larger than 0 just seemed to leave the compact line spacing of the footnotesize paragraph the same while increasing the gap between that line and the next item. It looked "off." I also tried this:

\item The problem is below:\\
\linespread{-0.2}
\footnotesize This is some footnote-sized text. When it wraps around it
still has normal-sized line spacing.

This reduces the spacing and the number can be fiddled with but it doesn't seem to want to take consecutive arguments; once linespread is set, it didn't want to set it back to 1 for the subsequent items.

Sorry to not be of more help. I did my digging primarily here:

• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Formatting#Line_Spacing
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Customizing_LaTeX#Line_Spacing

Update 1/6 If italics is okay, this looked favorable to me?

\item The problem is below:\\    
\footnotesize \begin{quote}This is some footnote-sized text. 
When it wraps around it still has normal-sized line spacing.\end{quote}

For some reason the quote environment seems to undo the spacing issue and the lines look compressed to me. What do you think? I tried to find out how to define the quote environment in order to remove the italics or indent but was unsuccessful so far.

Answer 3

You can undo the italics in the quote environment by adding \em inside it. (Regular type is the italic's emphasis.) To change the quote environment to use regular type globally, use \setbeamerfont{quote}{shape=\sf}.