table and figure captions

[Jim Owens]

Thanks for the explanation, but automated figure numbering is not 
impossible. You could define different Figure objects the same way you 
now define different Table objects, and have the title turned off for 
some figure objects and on for others, just as you can with tables.

When I migrated to Frame from Ventura many years ago, the lack of 
automated figure titles bothered me. In Ventura, not only did you have 
an automated figure title, you could position it top, bottom, left or 
right. In Frame the "answer" was to use a table. You can make this work, 
but it sure feels like a workaround.

The other practice in Frame, of placing a figure title as a separate 
paragraph in the text flow and anchoring the figure to it, is a bit of a 
workaround also. For paper output it removes any hope of controlling 
page breaks in a predictable fashion. On the other hand, if you move the 
figure title paragraph to an arbitrary spot to save your printed output 
from awkward breaks, your online help output suffers. And if you want to 
repurpose your text, the figure title paragraphs show up in the middle 
of it. Then you add conditional text markers, I suppose.

Frame supports floating figures, and they work pretty well most of the 
time. But we've moved away from floating figures for various reasons: 
they require a bit of extra DTP effort to use, they supposedly don't 
integrate well with online help output, and there's a theory that, for 
useability, when you mention a figure it has to be right there, not on 
the next page. (Personally, I don't find that floating figures interfere 
with the useability of professionally laid out magazines like _American 
Scientist_.  On the contrary, they're very convenient.)  And besides, 
floating figures don't have automated figure numbering, so you have to 
add a paragraph to the text flow anyway.

I for one am not convinced. Did we just give up?  Should Frame support 
automated figure numbers?









Fred Ridder wrote:
> Deirdre Reagan asked:
>  
>> Does anyone know why FM automatically makes Table captions but not
>> Figure captions?
>  
> Tables are well-defined encapsulated objects, and one of the properties
> that is defined is an optional Title object. If you define a table format
> to include a Title object, every table that you assign that format to
> will have a title frame to contain your title string. But you can also 
> define a table format that does not have a Title.
>  
> Figures, on the other hand, are not uniquely defined objects. There are 
> at least three different methods that are commonly used to insert a 
> figure (an anchored frame in the text flow, an unanchored frame in a
> fixed location on a page, or in an anchored frame in a table cell), so 
> there is no single place where a caption property could be defined to 
> apply in all cases. 
>  
> But a potentially workable solution is to always encapsulate figures in
> a single-cell table, since tables *do* have a defined Title object. This
> does limit flexibility somewhat regarding horizontal positioning (tables
> have their own logic of how and when to span columns and sidehead
> areas), but also has a few small additional benefits, like making it 
> very easy to globally or individually add/remove border rulings around
> figures, and providing facilities for encapsulating notes with the figure.
>  
> -FR
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