A very common question is how to change the numbering scheme for the enumerate environment (or the bulleting scheme of itemize). There are a few packages to do this; my personal choice is enumitem. Here is a short example:
\documentclass{article} \usepackage{enumitem} \begin{document} \begin{enumerate} \item One. \item Two. \item Three. \end{enumerate} \begin{enumerate}[noitemsep] \item One. \item Two. \item Three. \end{enumerate} \begin{enumerate}[noitemsep,label=(\alph*)] \item One. \item Two. \item Three. \end{enumerate} \end{document}
(similar options are provided for the itemize environment).
Notice that you can put more than one option simultaneously (using a comma to separate options), and that some options have the so-called “key=value” syntax (for example, you could say
\begin[label=\Alph:]{enumerate}
to get another numbering scheme). One thing which is good to remember is that a closing bracket (”]”) in the options will fool LaTeX—it means “options end here”. If you want to get a numbering scheme [1], [2] etc., you can write instead
\begin{enumerate}[label={[\arabic*]}]
(try it!); if you hide the closing bracket in curly braces, LaTeX won’t “see” it.
(You might be tempted to use that idea for bibliographies, but it’s better to use a specialized package—like amsrefs—for that purpose.)
Needless to say, the whole range of available possibilities is described in the enumitem package documentation.