Preventing enumerate item from breaking across pages

Question

To start off, I know this is addressed in this question, but their solution breaks for me in a particular case so I'm looking for something better.

The minimum working example #1 is shown below. The idea here is to redefine the enumerate environment as a new environment called procedure. The purpose of this new environment is to append some additional text to the end of every item in the environment. This works well, however, very often the appended text gets sent to another page if that particular item is near the page boundary.

The solution provided by the linked question above says to make the items into a minipage. This is done in MWE #2. This works fine to keep specific items together, but then those items will flow over the page! Inserting a \clearpage or \newpage before the specific items does nothing. My guess is that latex somehow doesn't know the size of the minipage items and thus cant' budget for their space properly.

Can anyone offer a resolution here? I'd just like the ability to keep an entire item in the procedure environment together and have it automatically push the entire item to the next page if it can't all fit at the end of the current page.

---

MWE #1

Code

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\def\initial{\par \vspace{2ex} Initial: \underline{\hspace{10em}}}
\let\olditem\item
\let\saveenumerate\enumerate
\let\saveendenumerate\endenumerate
\newenvironment{procedure}{%
    \def\newitem{\initial\olditem}
    \saveenumerate
    \def\step{%
        \let\step\newitem\olditem
    }
}{%
    \initial\saveendenumerate%
}

\begin{document}
    \begin{procedure}
        \step \lipsum[1]
        \step \lipsum[2]
        \step \lipsum[3]
        \step \lipsum[4]
        \step \lipsum[5]
    \end{procedure}
\end{document}

Output

The automatically appended text on item #4 is on the next page! I want to keep it with item #4, even if that means pushing item #4 to the next page entirely.

---

MWE #2

Code

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\def\initial{\par \vspace{2ex} Initial: \underline{\hspace{10em}}}
\let\olditem\item
\let\saveenumerate\enumerate
\let\saveendenumerate\endenumerate
\newenvironment{procedure}{%
    \def\newitem{\initial\olditem}
    \saveenumerate
    \let\closepage\relax
    \def\step{%
        \closepage
        \let\step\newitem\olditem
        \minipage[t]{\linewidth}
        \let\closepage\endminipage
    }
}{%
    \initial\closepage\saveendenumerate%
}

\begin{document}
    \begin{procedure}
        \step \lipsum[1]
        \step \lipsum[2]
        \step \lipsum[3]
        \step \lipsum[4]
        \step \lipsum[5]
        \step \lipsum[6]
    \end{procedure}
\end{document}

Output

The items are kept together now, but item #6 flows past the edge of the page! This doesn't work for me either.

Answer 1

You need to put your final code for the initials inside the minipage; your current code places this outside. A direct modification of your code to do this is as follows (it has the advantage you can just use the standard \item command):

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\newcommand{\initial}{\par \vspace{2ex} Initial: \underline{\hspace{10em}}\par}
\let\saveenumerate\enumerate
\let\saveendenumerate\endenumerate

\newenvironment{procedure}{%
    \saveenumerate
    \newcommand{\closestep}{}%
    \newcommand{\step}{%
        \closestep
        \item
        \minipage[t]{\linewidth}%
        \renewcommand{\closestep}{\initial\endminipage}%
    }%
}{%
    \closestep\saveendenumerate%
}

\begin{document}

\begin{procedure}
  \step \lipsum[1]
  \step \lipsum[2]
  \step \lipsum[3]
  \step \lipsum[4]
  \step \lipsum[5]
  \step \lipsum[6]
\end{procedure}

\end{document}

This produces two pages, with item 4 starting on the second page, no broken across the pages.

The dance saving the standard definitions of enumerate can be made more natural by using the environ package, which allows you define a new environment that puts its \BODY into a some given command sequence:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{environ}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newcommand{\initial}{\par \vspace{2ex} Initial: \underline{\hspace{10em}}\par}

\NewEnviron{procedure}{\newcommand{\closestep}{}
  \newcommand{\step}{\closestep
      \item
      \minipage[t]{\linewidth}%
      \renewcommand{\closestep}{\initial\endminipage}%
  }%
  \begin{enumerate}%
    \BODY
    \closestep
  \end{enumerate}%
}

\begin{document}

\begin{procedure}
  \step \lipsum[1]
  \step \lipsum[2]
  \step \lipsum[3]
  \step \lipsum[4]
  \step \lipsum[5]
  \step \lipsum[6]
\end{procedure}

\end{document}

Note I have used LaTeX's \newcommand/\renewcommand when possible.