I have for a long time been struggling with making lists more compact in LaTeX. While the standard lists often look good, as seen in the example below, there are times when space limits, etc. makes it necessary to save some space.
Up until now I have been using things like the rather ugly \vspace{-7pt} command to remove space between list items. Now I finally decided to figure out a better solution. While there are many different package to help with this, it seems like the enumitem package is the newest and most comprehensive solution for making compact lists.
It is possible to change the settings of individual lists, but it may be easier to change the settings globally. Then you need to add this to your preamble:
\usepackage{enumitem}
\setitemize{noitemsep,topsep=0pt,parsep=0pt,partopsep=0pt}
And you can then use the regular itemize function in LaTeX. The above example will then look like this:
This way you can remove the space between each item, between the list and the surrounding paragraphs, and the indention of the list items.