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As you probably know, LaTeX offers the possibility of writing information in the margin, in a very simple way, using the \marginparcommand. I personally use it to make keywords stand out, to give grammatical information about a difficult foreign word, and to write other kinds of personal comments to a text. But I think the usual appearance of the margin paragraphs is kind of ugly. First of all, the font size is too large. A smaller font makes it easier to see the difference between the body text and the comment. Second, LaTeX tries to stretch and hyphenate the text so it can be justified between the margins, which most of the time is impossible to do nicely within that limited space.
I always redefine my margin paragraphs. I adjust the width of the paragraph, the font size, and I make the text left-justified on a right page, and right-justified on a left page (when the twosideoption is used), to make it 'cling to' the body text.
In my example, I make the margin paragraph 1.2 inches wide, and set the font to footnote size. Adjust these settings so they fit your purposes.
\documentclass[twoside]{article} \setlength{\marginparwidth}{1.2in} \let\oldmarginpar\marginpar \renewcommand\marginpar[1]{\-\oldmarginpar[\raggedleft\footnotesize #1]% {\raggedright\footnotesize #1}} \begin{document} \begin{flushright} This is some text.\oldmarginpar{This is the old marginpar command. This is the old marginpar command.} \vspace{2cm} This is some other text.\marginpar{This is the new marginpar command. This is the new marginpar command.} \end{flushright} \end{document}