Table, rotatebox and itemization

Question

I'm trying to achieve something like this

+ --------------------------------------
+      | - Item entry one with multiple
+  A   |   rows blablabla
+  A   | - Item entry with blabla
+      | - Item entry
+ --------------------------------------

So here some explanations:

• In the left column, I want to have text but rotated by 90 degree (sorry, don't know how to write this in the example above ^^).
• Rotated text should be aligned vertically
• Itemization should not have any margins.
• paralist package is not an option, because it causes a compile error (I use some other packages that might cause the problem)

At the moment, I'm doing something like this:

\documentclass[12pt,twoside,openright,a4paper]{memoir}
\usepackage{soul}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathmorphing}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}
\usepackage{tabu}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{ m{0.4cm} p{7cm} }
   \rotatebox{90}{AA} &
      \begin{itemize}
           [label=\Square,leftmargin=*,
            nosep,noitemsep,partopsep=0pt,topsep=-35pt,after=\strut]
        \item Item entry one with multiple rows blablabla
      \end{itemize}
      \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

My problems are

• The rotated text is fixed at the top, not centered vertically. I also tried a \centering in the rotatebox, but no effect.
• The itemization has a lot of margins. Why? I define topset to be negative?!?

Thank you for your help! I'm starting to get nuts about this. If there is a solution without tables, e.g., floating boxes, it would also be appreciated!

Answer 1

You can, believe it not, use the tcolorbox package for this.

It might seem crazy to use a package that produces such beautiful framed environments to do something so simple, but it allows page breaks, and will align your AA perfectly.

The important part in the code below is

\newtcolorbox{warning}{parbox=false,breakable,
        enhanced,
        %arc=0mm,colback=red!5,colframe=red,
        leftrule=12mm,%
        frame hidden,
        interior hidden,
        %grow to left by=1cm,
    overlay={\node[anchor=north,outer sep=12pt,rotate=90] at (frame.west) {AA}; }}

This defines a new tcolorbox; I have commented out some options that you might like to play with in the future.

I loaded the showframe package only to highlight the page dimensions, and the lipsum package for sample text - you can remove them for your production document.

Here's a complete MWE to play with:

% arara: pdflatex
% !arara: indent: {overwrite: yes}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{showframe}
\usepackage[many]{tcolorbox}
\newtcolorbox{warning}{parbox=false,breakable,
        enhanced,
        %arc=0mm,colback=red!5,colframe=red,
        leftrule=12mm,%
        frame hidden,
        interior hidden,
        %grow to left by=1cm,
    overlay={\node[anchor=north,outer sep=12pt,rotate=90] at (frame.west) {AA}; }}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{enumitem}

\begin{document}

\begin{warning}
    \begin{itemize}
        [label=$\square$,leftmargin=*,
        nosep,noitemsep,partopsep=0pt,topsep=-35pt]
        \item \lipsum[1]
        \item \lipsum[1]
    \end{itemize}
\end{warning}

\end{document}