[Tex/LaTex] itemsep equivalent for subitem

Question

So I was wondering if there is the equivalent of itemsep for the subitems, particularly in the description environment. I know I could nest many environments one in the other but it seems ugly.

Exemple:

\begin{description}\itemsep2ex   
    \item[first item] \hfill\\
        \subitem \hfill\vspace{-1ex}\\
            some text
        \subitem \hfill\vspace{-1ex}\\
            some more text
        \subitem \hfill\vspace{-1ex}\\
            more text   
    \item[second item]
        \subitem some text 
\end{description}

This gives me what I want, but is there a way of replacing the 3 \vspace{-1ex} following the subitems by a general command for all the environment?

Thanks!

Answer 1

With the help of the enumitem package, it's straightforward to set different fonts and font shapes for the labels of items of varying hierarchical levels in a description list. The following MWE keeps the default for labels of level-1 description items (bold) but uses non-bold italics for the labels of level-2 description items. (If you wanted to use plain non-italics for the labels of level-2 description items, just leave off the \itshape directive.) Hopefully you can find some combination of font shapes and weights which doesn't strike you as ugly...

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\setlist[description,2]{font=\normalfont\itshape} % non-bold italics
\begin{document}
\section{Hello}
\begin{description}
  \item[First item] Initial thoughts \ldots
  \begin{description}
    \item[Preliminaries] The quick brown fox jumps \ldots
    \item[Further stuff] \ldots\ over the lazy dog.
  \end{description}
  \item[Second item] Further thoughts \ldots
\end{description}
\end{document}