Page Layout ⇒ Uneven two column layouts

[smut]

Hi,

I am new to latex. I am trying to get an uneven two column layout.
I am planning to use the larger right one for the text and the smaller left column for figures and small descriptions.

I referred to the forums and created the same using minipages. However, there are problems in this approach:
* Enclosing the figures requires me to put the minipages under an outer figure float. If I don't do that, then there is a 'not in outer par mode' error [I got this solution from the forums only!].

But the other problem that comes with this is the pagebreaks! Latex tends to think about this as one single thingy and tries to keep them together. I just want something like this uneven columns as layout and would like to proceed with it throughout the document. It would also be nice to have fancy headers and styles (or even if there is any packages developed already for the same that provides templates which I could use?) in the document.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

[localghost]

You could set up a document with large outer margins to put your figures and descriptions in. Note that in a one-sided layout this will always be the right margin. In a two-sided layout this will always be on the outside of the page (right on odd, left on even pages). For the stuff in the margin you can use the marginnote package for better adjustment. The epslatex document introduces a method to put figures into the margin. This needs the \captionof command provided by the caption package because the figures are not going to float.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten