UK TeX FAQ -- question 171

### Interrupting enumerated lists

It's often convenient to have commentary text, 'outside' the list, between successive entries of a list. In the case of `itemize` lists this is no problem, since there's never anything to distinguish successive items, while in the case of `description` lists, the item labels are under the user's control so there's no automatic issue of continuity.

For `enumerate` lists, the labels are generated automatically, and are context-sensitive, so the context (in this case, the state of the enumeration counter) needs to be preserved.

The belt-and-braces approach is to remember the state of the enumeration in your own counter variable, and then restore it when restarting enumerate:

    \newcounter{saveenum}
     ...
    \begin{enumerate}
     ...
     \setcounter{saveenum}{\value{enumi}}
    \end{enumerate}
    <Commentary text>
    \begin{enumerate}
     \setcounter{enumi}{\value{saveenum}}
     ...
    \end{enumerate}

This is reasonable, in small doses... Problems (apart from sheer verbosity) are getting the level right ("should I use counter `enumi`, `enumii`, ...") and remembering not to nest the interruptions (i.e., not to have a separate list, that is itself interrupted) in the "commentary text").

The mdwlist package defines commands `\suspend` and `\resume` that simplify the process:

    \newcounter{saveenum}
     ...
    \begin{enumerate}
     ...
    \suspend{enumerate}
    <Commentary text>
    \resume{enumerate}
     ...
    \end{enumerate}

The package allows an optional name (as in `\suspend[id]{enumerate}`) to allow you to identify a particular suspension, and hence provide a handle for manipulating nested suspensions.

If you're suspending a fancy-enumeration list, you need to re-supply the optional "item label layout" parameters required by the enumerate package when resuming the list, whether by the belt-and-braces approach, or by the `\resume{enumerate}` technique.

`enumerate.sty`
  Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/tools.tar.gz
`mdwlist.sty`
  Distributed as part of macros/latex/contrib/supported/mdwtools.tar.gz