Hi all,

     I'm formatting a CV using the ancient res package. I've run into a
problem regarding list spacing. There's too much space inserted when I
start a list without any text before it.

\employer{\textbf{Sunway Lagoon} {\small (Theme park)}}
\title{\emph{Lifeguard}}
\location{\small Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia}
\dates{\textbf{\small July 2004 -- August 2004}}
\begin{position}
\begin{itemize}  \itemsep -2pt
    \item responsible for visitors' safety on water slide and
theme park grounds
    \item administering basic first aid
\end{itemize}
\end{position}

gives this weird spacing, have a look:
<http://rubeus.org/tex/listitem.png>

If I have some text before the list like:

\employer{\textbf{Sunway Lagoon} {\small (Theme park)}}
\title{\emph{Lifeguard}}
\location{\small Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia}
\dates{\textbf{\small July 2004 -- August 2004}}
\begin{position}
EXTRA TEXT HEEBIE JIEBIES HOME GOOGLE and MORE
\begin{itemize}  \itemsep -2pt
    \item responsible for visitors' safety on water slide and
theme park grounds
    \item administering basic first aid
\end{itemize}
\end{position}

The spacing will be fine. Desperately need help to fix this ASAP. I've
gone through all my (freely available from TUG.org) printed LaTeX
tutorials but there's nothing said about spacings regarding lists and
the paragraph text like this. Many, many thanks in advance.

--Kheng-Swee Goh

I manage to find out about \topsep but even after using it in my code,
it doesn't seem to make a difference. I tried negative numbers (\topsep
-2cm) too. Anybody nice enough to point out and correct my mistake?
Thanks.

\employer{\textbf{Sunway Lagoon} {\small (Theme park)}}
\title{\emph{Lifeguard}}
\location{\small Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia}
\dates{\textbf{\small July 2004 -- August 2004}}
\begin{position}
\begin{itemize}  \topsep 1pt \itemsep -2pt
    \item responsible for visitors' safety on water slide and
theme park grounds
    \item administering basic first aid
\end{itemize}
\end{position}

Problem fixed via trial and error when I inserted \null\vspace{-1em}
before the list. But I'm still curious why \topsep didn't do the work.

\employer{\textbf{Sunway Lagoon} {\small (Theme park)}}
\title{\emph{Lifeguard}}
\location{\small Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia}
\dates{\textbf{\small July 2004 -- August 2004}}
\begin{position}
\null\vspace{-1em}
\begin{itemize} \itemsep -2pt
    \item responsible for visitors' safety on water slide and
theme park grounds
    \item administering basic first aid
\end{itemize}
\end{position}

Hello Goh,

probably the "res" package uses some tabular environment. It seems that
unneeded vertical space before and after a list in a cell is a known
problem without a good solution. In your case, instead of hardcoding
sizes, I'd try something like this (probably, with \null):

\vspace{-\baselineskip}\vspace{-\parskip}\vspace{-\parsep}

I don't know why \topset doesn't work. I suspect that that table cell
starts in the horizontal mode, and when a list adds a break penalty,
TeX creates an empty paragraph due to switching from the horizontal
mode to the vertical mode.

By the way, for my longtables I use the following commands:

\newcommand{\celltolist}{\vspace{-\baselineskip}\vspace{-\parskip}}
\newcommand{\listtocell}{\vspace{-\baselineskip}\vspace{-\parskip}\vspace{- \parskip}}

Probably it's only a coincide that these commands work for me.

--
Oleg Paraschenko  olpa@ http://uucode.com/
http://uucode.com/blog/  Generative Programming, XML, TeX, Scheme

"Oleg Paraschenko" <ole...@gmail.com>  schrieb:

No the problem is that the description of the list parameters is
misleading.  If you define a new list of your own, you can set topsep
etc, but the standard lists have predefined values and copy this values
at the start to internal registers and then use this internal
registers.

So if you want to change topsep e.g. in itemize you should set
\@topsep after \begin{itemize}.

--
Ulrike Fischer
e-mail: zusätzlich meinen Vornamen vor dem @ einfügen.
e-mail: add my first name between the news and the @.