[Lowerbounds, Upperbounds]

In some publications(*), space is at a premium. While I do not recommend tuning your baselinestretch in the main body of a paper, I believe there are other reasonable things to tweak. In particular, I often find the space used by itemized lists to be a bit more than desirable. But how can we cut the space down without inserting \vspace*{-1ex} before every \item?

Well, I just figured it out last week: you want to use the paralist package. What it does is to provide several new list environments that consume no space between list items by default. You can add some space back in, but this time you can control the amount. Here is an example:

\usepackage{paralist}
\setlength{\pltopsep}{0.5ex} % space before first item
\setlength{\plitemsep}{0.25ex} % space between items
\newenvironment{itemizeC}{\begin{compactitem}}{\end{compactitem}}

The last line in the example is really just for convenience if you happen to want to switch between normal lists and compact lists easily.

Also note that paralist is quite a feature-rich package. Among other things, it can let you customize the item bullets and margins, as well as providing an enumerated list environment inparaenum that wraps its items in a paragraph like: (i) blah; (ii) blah blah. Be sure to check out its documentation!

(*) You know I really meant conference proceedings, don’t you?