Hiding marginal notes

Question

While writing I tend to add a lot of notes using \marginpar. Is there a way to hide them before printing a final version?

Answer 1

There a number of methods you can use. One way is to use yet another package such as the todoor you can simply define a command as shown below, which will perhaps also be more semantically correct for notes.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,xcolor}

\def\noteson{%
\gdef\note##1{\mbox{}\marginpar[$\leftarrow$ ##1]{%
    \color{blue}$\leftarrow$ ##1}}}
\gdef\notesoff{\gdef\note##1{}}
\noteson
% Comment line above and uncomment to hide notes
%\notesoff
\begin{document}
\note{Adams disagrees on this issue.} This is some lipsum text
\lipsum[1-7]
\note{Check the reference out.} This is some lipsum text
\end{document}

You can switch them on and off using \notesoff or \noteson.

If you want to use the todo package check the post How to add todo notes?

Answer 2

Just redefine the command to do nothing:

\renewcommand{\marginpar}[2][]{}

Answer 3

You could use the comment package (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/comment). A little example (change \includecomment{note} to \excludecomment{note} to hide the margin note):

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{comment}

\includecomment{note}

\begin{document}

text text text text
\begin{note}
\marginpar{a margin note}
\end{note}
text text text

\end{document}

Answer 4

I've been taking two approaches - one being to use the opt package, which ties output to tags that can be toggled:

\newcommand{\marpar}[1]{\opt{note}{\marginpar{\fnsize #1}\index{TODO}}}

Another way to suppress output of those modified marginpars if the opt environment cannot be used would be to hide the \marginpar inside a macro that never gets called.

\newcommand{\marpar}[1] {{\newcommand{\lastunprintedcommand}{\marginpar #1}}}