How to a put a repeated text in the left margin of a page, like a header or footer, but on the side
The background package could be an option:
\documentclass{letter}
\usepackage{background}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just to generate text for the example
\SetBgAngle{0}
\SetBgScale{1}
\SetBgColor{black}
\SetBgOpacity{1}
\SetBgPosition{.01\paperwidth,-.5\textheight}
\SetBgContents{\fbox{\parbox{3cm}{%
Return Address:\\
John Q. Citizen\\
500 Park Place\\
Boston, MA. 01234}}%
}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-4]
\end{document}
There are a couple of packages that provide absolute positioning of items on a page. For example, the eso-pic
package allows for foreground or background placement of arbitrary stuff at page shipout. The following minimal example places a similar \fbox{\parbox{..}{...}}
to what is included in @Gonzalo's answer on the foreground of all pages in your document:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{eso-pic}% http://ctan.org/pkg/eso-pic
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\begin{document}
\AddToShipoutPictureFG{%
\AtTextCenter{%
\hspace*{-0.45\paperwidth}\fbox{\parbox{3cm}{%
Return Address:\\
John Q. Citizen\\
500 Park Place\\
Boston, MA. 01234}}%
}
}
\lipsum[1-6]
\end{document}
Using the starred version \...FG*{<stuff>}
only includes <stuff>
on the foreground of the current page.
Also see the documentations of the textpos
package and that of tikz
.