There are two possibilities for handling figures in preprints. One is the traditional method of attaching a page or more of figure captions at the end of the paper, followed by full page figures. This strategy has the advantage of providing large versions of figures which are later reduced to tiny sizes in the journal, and is popular among authors since it is also simple. The other is to include the figures in the body of the text. The AAS/WGAS Latex macros for preprints provide an opportunity to experiment with this latter technique. The preprint subcommittee feels that placing the figures at the end of the text should be the default, but that the capability to move figures into the body of the text be included in the AAS/WGAS Latex macros for preprints.
I suggest the AAS/WGAS Latex macros for preprints should place figures in the text with one Latex command to include the contents of a Postscript file containing the figure, and a second Latex command to place the figure caption for each figure immediately under the figure, followed by white space separating the figure caption from the main text. In some cases astronomers will not have the ability to create Postscript output for their figures, in which case a third Latex command is needed to leave the appropriate space (in cm or inches) for the figure above the figure caption, in case authors desire to paste in figures by hand. The preprint subcommittee suggests that the command to include a figure embedded within the text act as a comment to the journal suggesting where the figure should go in the paper, when used with aasms.sty, but this same command when used with aaspp.sty should actually incorporate the Postscript format figure into the text.