Lists

Many documents require lists of items, either numbered or simply enumerated. Plain TeX defines one macro to help with creating lists, \item, but that is insufficient in many cases. Therefore, Eplain provides two pairs of commands:

\numberedlist ... \endnumberedlist

\orderedlist ... \endorderedlist

These commands (they are synonyms) produce a list with the items numbered sequentially, starting from one. A nested \numberedlist labels the items with lowercase letters, starting with `a'. Another nested \numberedlist labels the items with roman numerals. Yet more deeply nested numbered lists label items with `*'.

\unorderedlist ... \endunorderedlist

This produces a list with the items labelled with small black boxes ("square bullets"). A nested \unorderedlist labels items with em-dashes. Doubly (and deeper) nested unordered lists label items with `*'s.

The two kinds of lists can be nested within each other, as well.

In both kinds of lists, you begin an item with \li. An item may continue for several paragraphs. Each item starts a paragraph.

You can give \li an optional argument, a cross-reference label. It's defined to be the "marker" for the current item. This is useful if the list items are numbered. You can produce the value of the label with \xrefn. See section Cross-references.

You can also say \listcompact right after \numberedlist or \unorderedlist. The items in the list will then not have any extra space between them (see section Formatting lists). You might want to do this if the items in this particular list are short.

Here is an example:

\numberedlist\listcompact
\li The first item.
\li The second item.

The second paragraph of the second item.
\endnumberedlist

• Formatting lists: Changing how the lists look.