How to redefine the spacing between entries in the List of Figures without using the tocloft package?

Question

There are a few posts about how to redefine the spacing in the LOF, but most use packages like tocloft, which changes the page number position to center in the frontmatter instead of the setting \fancyfoot[LE, RO]{\thepage}.

I want to use a command like:

\setlength{\parskip}{1.0 ex}

or

\setlength{\bibsep}{1.0 ex}

to set the space between list entries.

So how to redefine the spacing of the list of figures and tables for the book or article class, without changing the default page number position?

Answer 1

If your main reason for not using the tocloft package is its effect on the page numbering style of lists such as the Table of Contents and the List of Figures, you could address this issue by issuing the command

\tocloftpagestyle{fancy}

in the preamble (after loading the tocloft package, of course). As you've discovered, the default page style used by tocloft is indeed "plain".

Assuming you do choose to work with the tocloft package, the main length parameters available to affect the spacing between list items are \cftparskip and cftbeforeXskip, where X can be part, chapter, sec, subsec, subsubsec, para, subpara, fig, subfig, tab, and subtab. The default value of these parameters is 0pt. The \cftparskip and \cftbeforeXskip macros can be changed via \setlength commands.