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We are writing a textbook that has content for the student and recommendations directed to the teacher, something like this:

How can we sum $\frac{3}{7}$ with $\frac{7}{3}$?

\begin{teacher}
  A common mistake here is for the student to answer $\frac{10}{10}$.
\end{teacher}

This is how we do it...

So far so good. The problem lies on the way in which I want this text to be rendered.

We wanted to have the student text inside a minipage, without any text to the teacher inside. Then we want the teacher's material to surround the minipage, like in the following figure:

Idea of how we would like the two texts to flow

Visually, it looks similar to the question Making the text fit in a specific space in Latex, but the main problem we face is forcing the two texts to flow together, i.e. the suggestion for the teacher to appear close to the relevant exercise for the student.

There are several packages that could help, such as parcolumns. But they all seem to fail to sync the texts.

It would be ok to have to compile the text twice or to write metadata to the .aux file, but how would I go about this?

Augusto T.
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  • Just to be clear: You're not asking to replicate the display within the image you posted. All you're interested in is a means to provide the occasional floating text that should stay with the location where you place it, but (say) in the margins. Correct? – Werner Nov 09 '17 at 16:47
  • I already have the layout working as a standalone. The problem is that often there is more teacher material than student text or vice-versa and I would like to automatically add blank pages (to whichever is ahead) so that they sync back up. – Augusto T. Nov 09 '17 at 17:10
  • The request is too vague to be sure, but maybe the tufte-book class could be useful for you, as it is designed to place a lot of contents in a wide margin. Running texdoc sample-book will show you a sample. – Fran Nov 09 '17 at 18:10
  • If you already have code that is close to working then please post it. This will help clarify what you want and give people something to start from. Please do not post code snippets. Instead, post a complete minimal working example. That is, code that compiles and is as short as possible to demonstrate your problem. –  Nov 09 '17 at 20:41

0 Answers0