“Q” and “A” in margin - out of alignment

Question

I have defined a command for a letter in the margin as follows (using marginnote because marginpar did not work at all):

\newcommand{\sideletter}[1]{\marginnote{\Huge\bf\sffamily\color{orange} #1}}

I appreciate that there are likely going to be issues with vertical alignment, due to the different fonts/sizes and when issuing the commands I have done the following to address the issue:

\sideletter{Q}[-1mm]

and

\sideletter{A}[1mm]

This seems to just about fix the issue vertically. However I cannot seem to align horizontally - the A is just slightly further to the right.

Example image:

Does anyone have any idea about how to approach this? I have tried using hfill and centering but nothing seems to work.

Below is a minimum working example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\newcommand{\sideletter}[1]{\marginnote{\Huge\bf\sffamily #1}}
\setlength\parindent{0pt}
\begin{document}
\reversemarginpar
\sideletter{Q}
\lipsum[6]

\sideletter{A}
\lipsum[6]
\end{document}

I think in this MWE the misalignment is possibly less obvious, but it is still there. Perhaps the font choice does have some bearing on it, but not everything.

Answer 1

I would go about this a little differently. It seems to me that your 'Q' and 'A' could be wrapped up in a list environment, which makes me immediately think of the enumitem package.

Instead of using a command I have used an environment. Personally I find this preferable, as it may ease global changes later on- for example, you may wish to add numbers to the environment, or perhaps other decorations. See what you think- if it's not appropriate, perhaps someone else will have an alternative.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[showframe=true]{geometry}
\usepackage{xcolor}     % for colour
\usepackage{enumitem}   % for customizing lists
\usepackage{lipsum}     % for sample text

\newenvironment{question}{\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0mm]\item[\vbox to -5pt{\vss\hbox{\Huge\bf\sffamily\color{orange} Q}\vss}]}
{\end{itemize}}
\newenvironment{answer}{\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0mm]\item[\vbox to -5pt{\vss\hbox{\Huge\bf\sffamily\color{orange} A}\vss}]}
{\end{itemize}}

\begin{document}

\begin{question}
\lipsum[1]
\end{question}
\begin{answer}
\lipsum[1]
\end{answer}
\end{document}

If you plan to use \Huge for the question environment, you could use the following for the definition:

\newenvironment{question}{\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=0mm]\item[\Huge\bf\sffamily\color{orange} Q]\Huge}
  {\end{itemize}}

Answer 2

As far as I see, noone has explained the reason for your alignment problem yet. The bounding boxes mentioned by Frank Mittelbach do play a role (see below), but the more important point is that \marginnotes in the left margin are typeset \raggedleft (so that you have right alignment). So it's very much by design that the A is slightly further to the right: the Q is a bit wider and thus protrudes more to the left.

As explained in the marginnote documentation, you could switch to \raggedright:

\renewcommand*{\raggedleftmarginnote}{\raggedright}

But this is not a good idea since you'll get too much space between the \marginnote and the main text. A better solution would be to use

\newcommand{\sideletter}[1]{\marginnote{\Huge\bf\sffamily\rlap{#1}\phantom{Q}}}

(where I neglected that \bf is deprecated; I just wanted to stay close to the original code). This produces a \marginnote that has the width of the letter Q, and the letter you want is put flush left. If you look closely, the A will then be slightly further to the left:

This is explained in Frank's answer: The Q just has a bit more white space to the left in its bounding box. And again, this is by design! There's only a tiny bit of the A that protrudes to the left, whereas the Q has really a lot of black in the left, so visually you have appropriate left alignment.

Answer 3

This one seems to work with marginpar:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{xcolor,blindtext}
\newcommand*{\noPlace}{\hrule height0pt width 0pt}
\reversemarginpar
\newcommand{\QA}[2]{%
  \mbox{}\leavevmode\marginpar{\textcolor{orange}{%
    \noPlace\sffamily\Huge#1}}%
    {\noPlace#2}\par}
\setlength{\marginparwidth}{0.2in}%
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\begin{document}
\QA{Q}{\blindtext}

\QA{A}{\blindtext}

\end{document}

Answer 4

Regardless of the method of alignment (e.g., \marginpar, list, etc.) by the end of the day alignment happens by pushing some material towards the edge of some box. This will do proper alignment as long as the material pushed doesn't have any white space included.

With individual characters one may not expect this, but effectively there is and this is simply a feature of the font used. Individual characters are sitting in a bounding box and as far as TeX is concerned such a character is nothing but a rectangle. Whether or not the inkmaking up this character is within the bounds of this box, protruding out of it or even leaving some white space is not know to TeX. So the only remedy here is to visually look at what the font does and correct that.

\Huge\bf\sffamily    \vrule A\vrule Q\vrule

will give you

and as you can see there is different amount of white space around the letters. You can measure that and then manually correct for it using

Q\kern-1pt

or whatever is necessary. (Or on the other side if you try to left-align).

Answer 5

 \newcommand{\sideletter}[1]{\marginnote{\Huge\bf\sffamily\color{orange} #1}}

Here the letter will be the start of a paragraph in a fixed width parbox, so it will be flush left in that box and the distance between the letter and the main text will depend on the width and sidebearings of the letter. Also \bf is a deprecated LaTeX2.09 command, better to use bfseries and finally using \color at the start of a parbox can (usually will) cause mis-alignment vertically as it adds a whatsit node to the start of the vertical list which affects the vertical alignment calculations. Better to use \textcolor{orange}{#1} or\noindent\color{orange}#1 so that the color change whatsit gores into the first line of the paragraph rather than before the first line.

As tou want the letter to be strongly bound to the start of the paragraph I wouldn't use a marginpar/parginnote here. Either a list label as suggetsed in the first answer, or simply a box, as below.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{color}
\newcommand{\sideletter}[1]{%
\par\makebox(0,0)[r]{\Huge\bfseries\sffamily\textcolor{red}{#1}%
  \hspace{4pt}%
}\ignorespaces}
\setlength\parindent{0pt}
\begin{document}

\sideletter{Q}
\lipsum[6]

\sideletter{A}
\lipsum[6]
\end{document}