[texhax] \listoffigures, order of reference numbers

[William Adams]

On Apr 21, 2006, at 5:04 AM, Torsten Wagner wrote:

> thanks much for your help. I was aware of the special "figure-list  
> caption" which you can include in square brackets before the figure  
> caption.
> However, I just wonder that LaTeX does not take care of this effect.
> There are four reasons why I like to solve this problem.
>
> 1. I do not know, but maybe my colleague get forced (some  
> publishers still believe MS-Word invented the design-rules for a  
> good layout ;) ) to write in the "list-of-figures" exactly the same  
> text as in the real figure captions. If so, we have to find a  
> solution.

I can't think of a single reference style which would advocate having  
references show up like this --- certainly one wouldn't do it with a  
footnote.

How Word does it is immaterial here since it doesn't do bibliographic  
references at all --- so it's a question of how, say Endnote would  
handle it, and I'd be willing to wager it would have similar  
difficulties.

> 2. My colleague is relatively new to LaTeX. I convinced him with  
> the argument that he has not to take care of any reference-,  
> caption-, section-, page- or any other number since LaTeX will do  
> that boring job for him. If he get faced now with such a problem,  
> he will call me a cheater. ;)

You're not cheating, you're telling LaTeX something which is  
authorial in nature (what is appropriate for a list of figures,  
what's correct for the text).

This does raise an interesting idea of whether or no it would be  
desireable to write the citation macro so that instead of having two  
versions there was a short initial part (in the square brackets)  
which would appear in the List of Figures and whatever else was in  
the regular brackets would be appended to that in the main appearance  
in the text.

> 3. The supervisor is hmmm... from the other side of the LaTeX vs.  
> MS-Word war :D. If he find such a mistake, it will take months  
> until he stop to backbite on LaTeX.

All the more reason to get it right up-front.

> 4. ... the best reason at the end. As usual I like to learn and I  
> like to understand. Therefore, it is a pleasure to me to solve this  
> problem ;)

I found the initial short thing to be verbose and almost suggested  
doing it as follows:

\caption[Very important figure.]{This is the very
important figure caption. According to \protect\cite{d} ...}

Which editing makes your list of figures read better IMO.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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