Authors using LaTeX to typeset books with significant margin material often run into the problem of long notes running off the bottom of the page. A typical workaround is to insert vertical shifts by hand, but this is a tedious process that is invalidated when pagination changes. Another workaround is memoir’s sidebar function, but this can be unsatisfying for short textual notes, and standard marginpars cannot be mixed with sidebars. I will discuss a solution I put together to make margin pars “just work” by keeping a list of floating inserts and placing them intelligently in the output routine. Time permitting, I will also discuss some thoughts on improving LaTeX’s float placement specifiers.
