Left margin flush for itemize's item labels in LaTeX

Question

I am trying to get the item label to flush with the left margin of the page width within itemize, i.e.:

This is my sentence. Here are my items:

1. ITEMNAME
   • notice my list definition is indented
2. ITEMNAME
   • but my item labels are all flush with the left margin and not sticking out of it

Note I am using \item[ITEMNAME] \hfill \\ to create a definition style item with a linebreak between keyword and definition, as demonstrated above. How can I get the desired flush that only affects the item's label?

Answer 1

Consider using the enumitem package to perform your list management. Here's an example of what you might be after:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}% http://ctan.org/pkg/enumitem
\usepackage{showframe}% http://ctan.org/pkg/showframe
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
    [align=left,style=nextline,leftmargin=*,labelsep=\parindent,font=\normalfont]
  \item[FIRST ITEM] Note that my list definition is not indented
  \item[SECOND ITEM] This one is also not indented and the description
    is long enough to span two lines.
\end{description}
\end{document}

The optional argument to description performs:

• align=left: Ensures a left-aligned item label;
• leftmargin=*: Left margin of description is flush with left margin of text block;
• style=nextline: Automates the process of using \hfill \\;
• labelsep=\parindent: The gap between the label and the start of the item is \labelsep, which is set to be the same as the regular paragraph indent.
• font=\normalfont: This modifies the default bold font of the description item to \normalfont.

If need be, you can also create a new list environment to perform these "optional settings" automatically. For this, see \newlist and \setlist in the enumitem documentation (section 7 Cloning the basic lists, p 10).

showframe was only used to emphasize the text block boundaries within the example.