[Tex/LaTex] Brace and text in side margin

Question

Within a text, I would like to emphasize one or two paragraphs by placing a curly brace in the left side margin, and next to it some short text vertically centred around the brace's centre.

The question Adding a large brace next to a body of text shows how to add braces in the main text, maybe that can help as a starting point? A slight modification of the accepted answer there is

\documentclass{report} 
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\noindent$\left\{
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
\lipsum[2]
\end{minipage}
\right.$
\lipsum[3]
\end{document}

But this has the drawbacks that

1. it spills into the right, not the left margin;
2. I cannot add text to the brace; and that
3. the line spacing before the braced paragraph is incorrect.

Maybe this can be modified, or a completely different approach should be used? But I wouldn't know which one.

Answer 1

You can use a \makebox to define a new command with two arguments: the first one will contain the text for the brace, and the second one will contain the paragraph text; something along these lines:

\documentclass{report} 
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newcommand\BrText[2]{%
  \par\smallskip
   \noindent\makebox[\textwidth][r]{$\text{#1}\left\{
    \begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
    #2
    \end{minipage}
  \right.\nulldelimiterspace=0pt$}\par\smallskip
}    

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\BrText{Some text}{\lipsum[1]}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}