3.4 Bulleted and numbered lists

Bulleted lists are started by including on left edge a bullet character and a space and then providing the text for the list item. If text wraps to two or more lines, you need to indent the subsequent lines by as much as the beginning of the text on the bullet line. Top level list can only start after an empty line (this is to avoid misdetection of bullet characters appearing as first character of a line in an ordinary paragraph).

Numbered lists work similar to bulleted lists: you simply start the line with a number and a dot and a space and follow the text for the list item, indenting correctly if it wraps. Instead of arabic numerals, you can also use letters. The actual numbering of the ordinal list items is done automatically by the underlying formatter, so the numbers that you provide do not matter (but you must provide a number for pd2tex to understand that you are creating an ordered list), they are only for your own reference - or reference of those who want to view your document in the plain text format.

Description lists are introduced with a double colon. The text before the double colon is the description title and the text that follows is the description body. The body can be wrapped to multiple lines, but you need to indent the subsequent lines by four spaces.

PlainDoc supports arbitrary nesting of lists of different types. Also verbatim code and certain other constructs can be nested in lists.

  Lists and indent illustration  (| = current indent, : = parent's indent;
                                  lesser indent terminates construct)

  1.: parent list
    :a.|same level first (starts sublist)
    :b.|same level second
    :  |* subsublist first
    :  |* subsublist second
    :c.|same level third (terminates above subsublist)
    :  |* new subsublist
  2.: next parent item (terminates above sublist)

Lists and indent illustration (| = current indent, : = parent's indent; lesser indent terminates construct)

1. parent list

   1. same level first (starts sublist)

   2. same level second

      • subsublist first

      • subsublist second

   3. same level third (terminates above subsublist)

      • new subsublist

2. next parent item (terminates above sublist)