styleitems — TikZ-based decorative list labels with independent auto-numbering

Version: 1.0 Date: 2025-08-13 Author: Faris Hameed Email: classsec81@gmail.com License: LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) v1.3c or later

Description

styleitems provides a fully self-contained, independent auto-numbering system with TikZ-drawn decorative list labels. Unlike packages such as enumitem, each list manages its own counter through an internal stack mechanism, ensuring that nested lists never interfere with each other.

Available label shapes:

• Basic shapes: Circle, Square, Rectangle, Diamond, Triangle, Pentagon, Hexagon, Octagon, Star (5-point), Star (12-point)
• Callouts: Ellipse Callout (left/right), Cloud Callout (left/right)
• Arrows: Right, Left, Up, Down

Every shape comes in two flavours:

• Vertical (*List environments, using \MSAutoLine{})
• Inline (*Inline environments, using \MSAutoInline{})

Requirements

• tikz (with libraries: shapes.geometric, shapes.misc, shapes.callouts, shapes.arrows)
• xcolor (options: svgnames, dvipsnames, x11names)
• xparse
• etoolbox
• bidicontour (option: outline)
• graphicx

Manual installation

Copy styleitems.sty into a directory searched by TeX, e.g.:

TEXMFHOME/tex/latex/styleitems/

Then update the file database if needed (e.g. texhash).

Quick start

\usepackage{styleitems}

% Vertical list
\begin{AutoCircleList}[blue][arabic]
  \MSAutoLine{First item}
  \MSAutoLine{Second item}
\end{AutoCircleList}

% Nested lists — counters are fully independent
\begin{AutoCircleList}[blue][arabic]
  \MSAutoLine{Outer item one}
  \begin{AutoStarList}[Gold][aralph]
    \MSAutoLine{Inner item one}
    \MSAutoLine{Inner item two}
  \end{AutoStarList}
  \MSAutoLine{Outer item two}   % correctly shows 2, not 3
\end{AutoCircleList}

% Inline list
\begin{AutoHexInline}[ForestGreen][roman]
  \MSAutoInline{Alpha}
  \MSAutoInline{Beta}
  \MSAutoInline{Gamma}
\end{AutoHexInline}

Environment signature

Most environments accept four optional arguments:

\begin{Auto<Shape>List}[color][style][rotate][scale]

Callout environments add a direction argument:

\begin{AutoEllipseCalloutList}[color][style][direction][rotate][scale]

Numbering styles

License

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3c of this license or (at your option) any later version. The latest version of this license is in:

https://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt

This work has the LPPL maintenance status "maintained". The Current Maintainer of this work is Faris Hameed.

Repository

If you find a bug or want to contribute, please contact the author via email.