How can I make todonotes use all of the margin?

Question

I am using the todonotes package to place notes in the margin. However, the notes it adds use less than 1/3 of the margin, which makes it so only 4-5 characters can fit on a line! It's difficult to read the resulting notes. There is plenty of extra space between the marginal note and the body; how can I get todonotes to use that space?

Here is a minimal working example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{todonotes}
\begin{document}
blah
\todo{this is just a minimal example.}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Unfortunately, minimal is particularly bad to try the use of todonotes. If you use e.g. article (or whatever you would like to use later) it is already much better.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{todonotes}
\usepackage{showframe}
\begin{document}
blah
\todo{this is just a minimal example.}
\end{document}

I used the showframe package to make the page layout more obvious. You can have a look at this wiki page about latex page layout. Once you get the desired behavior, you can get rid of showframe again.

If it is still not enough margin, you can utilize the geometry package to give yourself ample place in the margin. You could add, e.g.,

\usepackage[paperwidth=210mm,
            paperheight=297mm,
            left=50pt,
            top=50pt,
            textwidth=345pt,
            marginparsep=25pt,
            marginparwidth=124pt,
            textheight=692pt,
            footskip=50pt]
           {geometry}

and the upper page would look like this: