Push marginpar up

Question

I'm using the marginpar to put side notes, but instead of having them facing the line where they are called, I would like the whole marginpar to be pushed up. How can I achieve that?

I tried adding a negative \vspace in my call to marginpar, but it messes up everything...

Answer 1

Consider the following minimal example:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]\par
\marginpar{\vspace{-4em}Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.}\lipsum[2]
\end{document}

It produces a movable \marginpar that is vertically offset above its former position:

This works well for individual \marginpars. The reason for this is because LaTeX handles a \marginpar in a very similar way to handling floats, allowing it to move along the side of the page (or possible flow to a following page). The advantage with this is that it also allows for these "margin floats" to float with one another - like figures/tables; thereby not typesetting over top of one another. When you add a negative space to a single \marginpar, it affects all those that formerly "touched" it. Consequently, you cannot merely duplicate the negative vertical space between two "touching" \marginpars. You have to set each \marginpar's vertical offset individually.

Consider, by virtue of an example, the following document (cropped left image below):

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
\leavevmode\marginpar{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.}Donec congue dolor ut orci 
cursus adipiscing. Suspendisse porttitor nisi sed risus varius nec lacinia enim 
bibendum. Fusce ut odio in enim dapibus condimentum. \marginpar{Lorem ipsum dolor 
sit amet.}Pellentesque ultrices scelerisque urna, nec volutpat est vehicula vel. 
Nulla facilisi. Ut egestas porta placerat. Duis in velit a tellus condimentum luctus. 
Fusce ac turpis diam. In quis libero in diam varius sodales. Phasellus sed odio ac 
felis elementum volutpat. In tempor dolor vel velit scelerisque vel consequat quam 
interdum. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per 
inceptos himenaeos. Vivamus id quam erat, eget posuere eros. Quisque non nisl dolor. 
Pellentesque eros justo, sagittis ut sollicitudin vitae, condimentum quis lacus. 
Vivamus facilisis scelerisque dui non laoreet.
\end{document}

If only the first \marginpar is changed to

\marginpar{\vspace{-4em}...}

in order to offset it vertically higher on the page, both \marginpars move (cropped right image below):

Answer 2

use package marginnote, it has an optional argument for the vertical shift

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
foo bar baz\marginnote{Lorem ipsum}[-1cm]

\lipsum[1]
\end{document}