Latex

Here are a number of ways to reduce the horizontal and vertical whitespace around enumerate (and probably itemize) lists in LaTeX. These all assume you are using a list of compactenum.

Default

\newenvironment{compactenum}{
  \begin{enumerate}
}{
  \end{enumerate}
}

Smaller

\newenvironment{compactenum}{
  \begin{enumerate}[leftmargin=0.75cm,parsep=0pt,topsep=0pt]
}{
  \end{enumerate}
}

Smallest

\newenvironment{compactenum}{
  \vspace{-4mm}
  \begin{enumerate}[leftmargin=0.5cm,parsep=0pt,topsep=0pt]
}{
  \end{enumerate}
  \vspace{-4mm}
}