Figure captions

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JohnAtl
New to all this
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Jun 03, 2017 4:16 am

Figure captions

Post by JohnAtl »

Before I abandon Mellel, I just want to confirm that captions cannot be attached to images and figures. Is that correct?
Bulow
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 161
Joined: Tue Nov 25, 2008 11:49 am
Location: Paris (sometimes Copenhagen)

Re: Figure captions

Post by Bulow »

As for me, I am not on the point of abandoning Mellel, but I am afraid you are right. At least I have never found how to do it.
It would be a very nice feature and I often need it.
Bulow
benjaminpelissie
Got the auto-title mojo working
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:12 am

Re: Figure captions

Post by benjaminpelissie »

I achieve that by referencing from the text legend to the picture in question. Not ideal though. That is one of the many little things that are still lacking with Mellel; it can be quite tricky to actually keep a nice structure in long documents.
Pharaoh
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 4:49 pm

Re: Figure captions

Post by Pharaoh »

I understand the frustration. Mellel has very beautiful feature, but when I use something to write I need to think about the final output. I confess, as long as someone else is doing the design of the final version of my paper or book, Mellel works perfectly, as an editor will use InDesign for me, so I do not really care what the paper will look.
If I need to do something I want to have more control about the final layout, or you do a two step procedure:
1. I write my paper in Mellel/Word/whatever
2. I then proceed to make a very beautiful layout in InDesign

OR

You need to go through LaTeX. Just for your information, I have written my second book with xeLateX. While certainly painful, he gave me the final results I searched for. But I needed to work with coding, and look back and forth between the code and the final page.
Please bear in mind that I am an Egyptologist, so I needed to mix hieroglyphs, texts and plates/figures - I know Bulow's work BTW. I am not a Maths/Computer specialist.

So I stick with Mellel as it is easy to work with Bookends, as long as I do not have to process the final version of the document.

I hope my description may help.
Icelander
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 366
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2014 10:59 pm

Re: Figure captions

Post by Icelander »

benjaminpelissie wrote: Tue Dec 26, 2017 5:24 pm I achieve that by referencing from the text legend to the picture in question.
How do you do that? And how do you align the caption of a floating image?
Can you please give a step-by-step instruction how to do it?

Thank you
benjaminpelissie
Got the auto-title mojo working
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:12 am

Re: Figure captions

Post by benjaminpelissie »

What I meant is that I keep the link between a figure and its caption. To do so I:
1. give the figure a title that is also going to be the title of the caption also, eg. "Figure 1"
2. assign a Cross reference target ID to the figure (double-click on it), that is usually the same as its title (or close enough, eg. "Fig. 1"), so that I avoid mismatches and keep track of everything
3. then, where I want the caption to be, instead of writing "Figure 1: blablabla" (blablabla being the actual caption), I insert a reference that calls for the created target ID of my figure (in the "existing target" field of the "Edit reference" window) and ask for the inserted element to be the image title (not Page # or any auto-title stuff), so that I get my "Figure 1: blablabla", but with "Figure 1" that is linked to the actual figure and dynamically updated if I change the figure's title/target ID.

I hope this will help (but I also think you might have figured it out already; sorry if I misunderstood you). Like I said, it's not ideal. It also suggests clearly that the resources are available for this functionality to be implemented in the Image editing popover, along with every other image features that can be tweaked. I really expect to see that coming to Mellel... Overall, there's stil a lot of room for improvements in Mellel when it comes to figure, tables and boxes management.
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