The enumitem
package is your most convenient option here:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}% http://ctan.org/pkg/enumitem
\begin{document}
\noindent Here is some text.
\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=*,labelindent=12.5mm,labelsep=6.3mm]
\item Here is some text.
\item Here is some text.
\end{itemize}
\noindent \rule{12.5mm}{1pt}$\bullet$\rule{6.3mm}{1pt} \par
\noindent Here is some text.
\end{document}
Setting the leftmargin
flush with the left margin (via *
), leaves you to manually set labelindent
(space between left margin and bullet) and labelsep
(space between bullet and text).
The generalize these settings (and not have to set it locally via the optional argument), you can use
\setlist[itemize,1]{leftmargin=*,labelindent=12.5mm,labelsep=6.3mm}
which sets the first level of itemize
to have the required layout. You can also create your own list using \newlist
. See section 7 Cloning the basic lists (p 10) in the enumitem
documentation.
To add vertical spacing between items in the list, modify the itemsep
property. Here's the above MWE with such a modification:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}% http://ctan.org/pkg/enumitem
\setlist[itemize,1]{leftmargin=*,labelindent=12.5mm,labelsep=6.3mm,itemsep=2\baselineskip}
\begin{document}
\noindent Here is some text.
\begin{itemize}
\item Here is some text.
\item Here is some text.
\end{itemize}
\noindent \rule{12.5mm}{1pt}$\bullet$\rule{6.3mm}{1pt} \par
\noindent Here is some text.
\end{document}
Other vertical spacing properties include topsep
, partopsep
and parsep
. The documentation, again, includes descriptions on their impact.
The bottom row with rules in the above MWE is just to verify the lengths between the list elements.
Before setting \parindent
to zero, we can store its value in another length variable and redefine the \indent
command to use this other length variable instead of \parindent
(which has been set to zero).
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\newlength\tindent
\setlength{\tindent}{\parindent}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\indent}{\hspace*{\tindent}}
\begin{document}
This is some text that will not be indented.
\indent This is some text that will be indented.
\end{document}
Best Answer
You actually chose a poor example, since
\lipsum
starts a new paragraph unless you call thelipsum
package with thenopar
option. As such, leaving an empty space between paragraphs is fine to separate paragraphs.Issuing a
\paragraph{}
to start a new paragraph is, however, not the best idea. You can "rectify" this by redefining what\paragraph
means. In this case, it suffices to make it equivalent to\ignorespaces
: