Figures and Tables

There are two other things which tend to appear at the end of a paper and to which one refers in the text. These are Figure Captions and Table Captions. In general these things come up as you are typing in some text and decide Aha! This is a good place for a figure (or table). As with equations and references, it is convenient to be able to generate a number for this figure(table), name it and file away the text of the figure caption (or something which will remind you what figure you wanted to put there) in a file called figures.texauxil (or tables.texauxil) to be printed at the end of the paper. The commands which accomplish this feat are
FIG
name{ text }
and
TABLE
name{ text }
As in all other variants of this naming convention,
name
will be the name of the figure (or table) generated, and text is the material to be stored away in a file on your A disk. These commands work like the reference or equation commands in that the numbering is automatic and will always be correct no matter how you subsequently modify the text. The commands, analagous to
refout
, which print the list of figure or table captions are
figout
and
tabout
which should come as no big surprise.

There is a fundamental way in which the figure and table caption macros differ from the reference macros; namely, they do not automatically generate a reference mark. This is because you normally want to say something like … as you can see from Fig. 7 or something like that. The basic macros, i.e.
FIG
or
TABLE
permit you to type this in as you please. For example, one way to have TEX generate the line above is to type =7 … as you can see from
FIG
?{ text }
Fig.˜
?
which will produce … as you can see in this is the picture of the Mona Lisa generated as a fractile Fig.  Obviously, using this form of the command (either for a figure or a table) you have total control of what follows. Moreover, for simplicity I chose to name the figure
?
since I only intended to refer to it this one time. It is clear that I could have given it any name.

For those of you who are happy to use the command exactly in this way, i.e. to name the figure
?
, file away the caption and then type either Fig.˜
?
or fig.˜
?
there are two macros, named
Fig
and
fig
respectively. The syntax of these commands is somewhat simpler; namely,
Fig{ text }
and
fig{ text }
They are the analogues of the set of reference macros which automatically generate a reference mark whose name is
?
after filing away the text of the figure caption. What they do is first execute the command
FIG
?{ text }
and then follow this by either Fig.˜ or fig.˜ . The analagous macro for tables is
Table{ text }
which performs the same task as typing
TABLE
?{ text }
Table˜
?

This completes our discussion of macros associated with things which come at the back.