mix marginnotes with marginpars without overlap

Question

We are trying to put the figure caption as well as the footnotes in the margin and got very good results with the tufte-latex package. However, we have to manually adjust the offset of each sidenote or caption so that they do not overlap. Please see the following part of a page. Please note, how reference 64 was manually moved up to not be too close to the caption.

Now, we have to find something fully automatic and I found the marginfix package. It works great and can move \marginpars around to get very pleasing results. Please see this article how it works. I tried to make the sidenote package to combine the look with the automatic feature.

Nevertheless, it is not useful to move a figure caption away from the adjacent figure. Therefore, the caption is placed with a \marginnote from the marginnote package. If the margin gets very crowded, the \marginpars start to overlap with the \marginnotes.

It seems, that was addressed in the first version of marginfix. I could 'block' some part of the margin with \blockmargin. Does anyone know why \blockmargin was dropped in the rewrite of marginfix? I asked the author, but got no response. The repository of marginfix is here.

Or is there another way to 'forbit' some area of the margin for \marginpar?

I tried a MWE to generally demonstrate the problem. Please replace the filename in the \includegraphics macro.

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{marginnote}

\usepackage[paperwidth=170mm, paperheight=240mm, left=40pt, top=40pt, textwidth=260pt, marginparsep=20pt, marginparwidth=100pt, textheight=560pt, footskip=40pt]{geometry}

\begin{document}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. 
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Donec vehicula augue eu neque. 
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Pellentesque habitant morbi tris- tique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Mauris ut leo. Cras viverra metus rhoncus sem. Nulla et lectus vestibulum urna fringilla ultrices.
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Phasellus eu tellus sit amet tortor gravida placerat. Integer sapien est, iaculis in, pretium quis, viverra ac, nunc. 

\begin{figure}[h]
\marginnote{This would be where the caption should be.}
\includegraphics{broken_loop}
\end{figure}

\lipsum[3]


\end{document}

Answer 1

If the figure is a float, my first feeling is to allow to the figure float in a more fine place than "here", that is saturated of margin notes.

When the image must be just "here", a manual option is to adjust the alignment caption, for example using amargincap environment of the mcaption package or using SCfigure environment of the package sidecap with normal caption (which can be aligned with \sidecaptionvpos).

But for a general solution to prevent any posible overlapping of the side caption with preceedings \marginpar notes (with some extra separation), simply convert the caption in a \marginpar note, using \figcaption (of package captdef), but outside of the float (that you can omit safely in this case).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage[paperwidth=170mm, paperheight=240mm, left=40pt, top=40pt, textwidth=260pt, marginparsep=20pt, marginparwidth=100pt, textheight=560pt, footskip=40pt]{geometry}

\usepackage{captdef}

\begin{document}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. 
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Donec vehicula augue eu neque. 
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Pellentesque habitant morbi tris- tique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Mauris ut leo. Cras viverra metus rhoncus sem. Nulla et lectus vestibulum urna fringilla ultrices.
\marginpar{This could be a couple of references and other sidenotes.}
Phasellus eu tellus sit amet tortor gravida placerat. Integer sapien est, iaculis in, pretium quis, viverra ac, nunc. 

\marginpar{\textcolor{red}{\figcaption{
This would be where the caption should be.}}}

\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{broken_loop}
\end{figure}

% or simply
% \marginpar{\figcaption{...}}
% \noindent\includegraphics{broken_loop}    

\lipsum[3]
\end{document}