marginpar infobox

Question

I apologize for not knowing the correct term for this, but I want to put some kind of a infobox at the beginning of each section. What I want to ask about is for example on Wikipedia: you have this box on the right side where you can find information like population figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin. What's in this box might even be redundant to what is written in the text, but it makes it much nicer to (skim) read the document.

Ideally, I want this infobox to contain a tabular and I'd like it to be placed in the margin, but reaching inside the paragraph with the text floating around the box. Basically like this:

Can you tell me what the term for this is and what package I can use for this?

Answer 1

These are called wrapped illustrations and you can use Donald Arseneau's wrapfig package to create them.

wrapfig provides the environments wrapfigure and wrap-table for typesetting a float at the edge of the text, and making the text wrap around it.

The wrapfigure and wrap-table environments interact properly with the \caption command to produce proper numbering, but they are not regular floats like figure and table, so (as the manual says beware!) they may be printed out of sequence with the regular floats. You use them as follows:

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{.4\textwidth}
    \includegraphics[width=.4\textwidth]{./path/file}
    %\caption{Wrapped figures}
    \begin{tabular}{ll}
      name & amanda\\
      age  & 25\\
    \end{tabular}
\end{wrapfigure}

If you want to add more information, such as a small table, use a tabular after \includegraphics. The format of the environment command allows for the insertion of an "overhang" amount to push the image into the margin a bit if required. For example

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}[20pt]{.4\textwidth}
  %...
\end{wrapfigure}