Dear all, I skimmed through most of the answers, so forgive me if the following has already been said.
The question triggers an old LaTeX reflex; If the layout tweak or typography tune turns out to be very difficult to accomplish with LaTeX (including all the mainstream add-ons), then the reason could be that you ask for something which most typographers consider to be a really bad idea. Maybe I use these options incorrectly, but aren't plain parentheses, '()', and footnotes, the traditional means for adding stuff which the reader can skip? The usual recommendation is to avoid using these tools too much, since they distract. This said, I would like to mention some old-fashioned typography used in (a reprint of) the sixth edition of "Hydrodynamics" by sir Horace Lamb. Some stretches of the text in it are printed with smaller font size than the bulk. First I thought these stretches contained background information, elaborations on nitty gritty details, or something of this kind. As this theory wasn't supported by the contents of these harder to read sections, I struggled to come up with a good explanation. My current guess is that this book was produced so long ago that the publisher and author could not afford the luxury of producing new page breaks for the later editions of the book. In order to fit longer explanations into the narrative, the text just had to shrink a bit. The first edition was published 1879, the sixth 1932, and Knuth was born 5 years later. Another unusual feature is that the book makes do without figure and table numbers and captions. Each table and figure has been placed "in context", and you will just have to read the text to learn about them. Cheers Rasmus
