Horizontal alignment of marginal notes in a linguistic text.

e.g.

<pre>  Duis vel enim vitae lorem vestibulum
  fermentum at ac libero<sup><font color="#ff0000">1</font></sup>. Nunc in ipsum      <sup><font color="#ff0000">1</font></sup>note about libero
  sem. Cras et felis libero. Nam sit<sup><font color="#ff0000">2</font></sup> amet    <sup><font color="#ff0000">2</font></sup>note about sit
  augue magna, vel dignissim magna.</pre>

2. Further to that, how would I deal with two marginal notes colliding with each other as a result of there being two notes too close to each other?

3. On a very similar note, I am also looking to create some parallel translations of continuous prose (latin/greek text and its translation side by side). How can I balance the widths of two columns of text so that paragraphs align horizontally without extraneous line breaks? I don't like the idea of using tables as this is ugly and will create unnecessarily large inter-paragraph spacing.

If somebody has a solution to the first two problems, I expect I'll be able to infer an answer to the third.

Cheers,
Sam