Spacing issues with itemize in a table

Question

I've been trying to use lists of items in a table. This was easy to do but I could not find a way to align them in the same way as plain text in a table. Let me give an example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{paralist}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|p{2cm}|p{10cm}|}
    \hline
    Blah blah & 
    \begin{compactitem}
        \item First
        \item Second
    \end{compactitem} \\    
    \hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Instead of just itemize I used paralist so the list gets more compact, however there is still a lot of space added before and after the list. The result looks pretty awful, I would like to have the same spacing around "Blah Blah" as I have around the items in the right cell.

I've also found some tricks to reduce the space to the upper or lower \hline of the cell, but none of these could match the alignment with just plain text.

Answer 1

You could also use enumitem package. Using it you can access various useful settings as key-value pairs:

\usepackage{enumitem}
\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|p{2cm}|p{10cm}|}
    \hline
    Blah blah & \begin{itemize}[topsep=-0.5cm]\item First \item Second \end{itemize} \\    
    \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

If that is not enough, you can manually kill space with \vspace*{-1.5mm}. Asterix ensures the space is added (in this case, because the number is negative, removed).

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{enumitem}
\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|p{2cm}|p{10cm}|}
\hline
Blah blah & \vspace*{-0.2cm}\begin{itemize}[topsep=-0.5cm,leftmargin=0.3cm]\item a \item b \end{itemize}\\    
\hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Both the answer and the result seem very ugly to me.

Answer 2

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{paralist,array}
\makeatletter\let\MPtrue\@minipagetrue\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|p{2cm}|p{10cm}|}
    \hline
    Blah blah & \MPtrue
    \begin{compactitem}
        \item First
        \item Second
    \end{compactitem} \\\hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}