[OS X TeX] Quote environmnet versus lists

[Chris Goedde]

On Jan 23, 2011, at 5:22 PM, Josep Maria Font wrote:

> It's \itemsep that controls this. And this is how {quote} is defined. For this and other situations where I don't like the spacing between items of a list, I always include the following command in my preamble:

No, \itemsep controls the spacing between items, not between paragraphs within an item.

So I think I figured out what's going on. The quote environment is itself a list. Here's the definition from article.cls:

\newenvironment{quote}
               {\list{}{\rightmargin\leftmargin}%
                \item\relax}
               {\endlist}

So I think what's happening is all the values for the list are getting set to the defaults for an inner list. But I don't want that. Is there a way to tell TeX to reset (or preserve) the nesting level within a list? Alternatively, is there a way to get the effect of the quote environment (shrinking the margins) without using the list command? Or, other suggestions? I don't want to have to manually re-adjust the spacing of the list every time it's inside the quote environment; this is something I actually do rather frequency.

Chris