Margin notes

Margin notes provide complementary information to support the main document, or can be used for additional notes while working on a collaborative project. This article explains how to use margin notes in your LaTeX document.

Introduction

LaTeX provides a native command to add margin notes to your document

\marginpar{The new section start point will be pointed out 
by an arrow}

The text inside the braces of \marginpar{ } is printed in the right or outer margin of the page.

The marginnote package

For more flexible margin notes the package marginnote can be used

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{marginnote}

\begin{document}
...

\marginnote{This is a margin note using the geometry package, set at 
3cm vertical offset to the line it is typeseted.}[3cm]

...

The package geometry imported by \usepackage{geometry} provide commands to manipulate the dimension of several elements in a LaTeX document. After importing that package, marginnote is imported by \usepackage{marginnote} and the you can use the command

\marginnote{This is...}[3cm]

That prints the text inside the braces, the second parameter inside brackets determines the vertical alignment relative to the line where the command is used. Negative values are allowed.

Choosing the edge for the margin notes

The default edge to print margin notes is the left for one-sided documents, outer for double-sided documents and the closest for two-column documents. You can explicitly change that.

\reversemarginpar
\marginnote{This is a margin note using the geometry package, set at 5cm 
vertical offset to the first line it is typeset.}[3cm]

The command \reversemarginpar prints the markin note in the opposite margin.

Further reading

For more information see

• Page size and margins
• Footnotes
• Lengths in LaTeX
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Multiple columns
• Headers and footers
• Paragraph formatting
• Bold, italics and underlining
• Font sizes, families, and styles
• The marginnote package documentation