I'm trying to get this result in LateX. I've looked at a few questions about indenting an entire paragraph but can't find how to keep my abstract label at the margin and then indent the rest of the paragraph next to it. how would I achieve this?
[Tex/LaTex] Indenting part of a paragraph
indentationparagraphs
Related Solutions
I assume the implied question is how to stop the indent. You can use \noindent to stop the indent for a single para or \setlength\parindent{0pt} to globally 0 the indentation. The following paragraph is just a normal paragraph there is no interaction from the preceding multicols (unlike a section head)
Setting the \setafterXskip parameters to a non-zero value (even to a non-detectable 1sp as in my code below) fixes the problem:
\documentclass[12pt,a5]{memoir}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\semiisopage% a default margin layouts
% fix margin notes
\setmarginnotes{3em}{0.2\textwidth}{2\onelineskip}
%% No numbered sections
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
%% Section Names in margin
\newcommand{\marginhead}[1]{%
\marginnote{\bfseries\centering #1}}
%% set section, subsection and subsubsection headers
%% all the same, small bold text
\setsecindent{-1em}
\setbeforesecskip{-2em}
\setaftersecskip{1sp}
\setsecheadstyle{\small\marginhead}
\setsubsecindent{0em}
\setaftersubsecskip{1sp}
\setsubsecheadstyle{\small\marginhead}
% etc.
%% Paragraph styles
%%
%% no indent, skip line instead
\abnormalparskip{\baselineskip}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\checkandfixthelayout
\begin{document}
\section{First Section}%
\lipsum[1]
\subsection{First Subsection}
\lipsum[1]
\section{Second Section}
\lipsum[1]
\subsection{Second Subsection}
\lipsum[1]
\subsection{Third Subsection}
\lipsum[1]
\end{document}
A portion of the result:
I changed \marginpar to \marginnote from the marginnote package.
Best Answer
The main thing is to place the "title" into a \makebox to force it to be a certain width. Whether you should tweak a number or solve for it using \settowidth is another issue. One can use the plain TeX \hangindent (which goes away after one paragraph), a \parbox or a minipage. The main difference is that you can't break a page in the middle of a \parbox or minipage.