Formatting for body of \item in itemize/enumerate/description environment

Question

What I am looking for is a way to specify some formatting, say italics, for the body of each \item in an itemize/enumerate/description environment, up front, without having to do it explicitly for each item. Moreover, I want no formatting for the Labels. This is what I want:

And here is my code sample:

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}


\begin{document}

\textit{\begin{itemize}[font=\normalfont]
 \item[Label 1:] Item 1
 \item[Label 2:] Item 2
 \item[Label 3:] Item 3
\end{itemize}}

\end{document}

Is this a good way of doing it or is there a better way?

Answer 1

To setup any list environment the package enumitem is a very good choice.

The package provides the key before where you can execute any code. If you set \itshape this will influence the whole inclusive of the labels. So you have to set the font of the labels by \normalfont.

This leads to:

\begin{itemize}[before=\itshape,font=\normalfont]

This method is recommend to setup one list.

Modifying all lists maybe separate by the type you can use the command \setlist

The following line sets every label to \normalfont whereby the body font will be italics.

\setlist{before=\itshape,font=\normalfont}

If you want to specify the environment you can use the optional argument of \setlist

\setlist[itemize]{before=\itshape,font=\normalfont}

The command \setlist allows much more. For example the specifying of the influenced depth.

I recommend to have a look at the documentation which also provides a lot of examples.