Supporting short figure/table captions for list of figures/tables

[wuffi]

The captions of figures or tables often need to be long in order to provide the reader with an accurate explanation about what is being shown.
To prevent the list of figures from becoming too difficult to read, LaTeX is offering an optional argument in the \caption[short description for list of figures/tables]{Here comes the full explanation, which can consist of multiple sentences. This is particularly useful when having multiple subfigures.}.
As far as I can see, there is no way to map a figure caption written in R Markdown/knitr to this macro.
However, I think this would be both, helpful and technically feasible.
Please note that there is already some discussion in the development of pandoc to implement such a feature (jgm/pandoc#2417).

[yihui]

I believe this should work:

```{r foo, fig.cap="Long caption.", fig.scap="Short caption", out.extra=''}

out.extra='' is just a token to let knitr render LaTeX code for your figure; it is not required when you have specified out.width or fig.align.

Of course, this will only work for LaTeX/PDF output.

[yihui]

BTW, next time please try to ask questions on StackOverflow instead. You may also try the RStudio Community. Thanks!

[wuffi]

Hi Yihui,
Thanks a lot for your quick supply. This is awesome.
I hadn't found any documentation on the fig.scap option and thought this would be needed to be implemented first.

[yihui]

It is not easy to discover all knitr features. I want to bring happy surprises to users for decades. Just kidding. 😀

[wuffi]

Hello, sorry for re-opening this issue.
For figures, short captions work very well.
For tables, I can't see such an option. Is there a way to get short captions for tables?

[yihui]

Not for now, e.g., knitr::kable() does not have an argument for short captions.

[wuffi]

Thanks a lot for your quick answer.
Doesn't kable() have an argument caption.short() (see yihui/knitr#1199 for details)?
The issue rather is with Markdown tables in bookdown. For them, I would use something like Table: and don't see a simple way how to add a short caption.

[yihui]

WAT? I had implemented it two years ago? I totally forgot it!

You are right that there is no way to specify short captions with Markdown tables. Your only options are: (1) file a feature request to Pandoc; or (2) use knitr::kable(..., caption.short = ...).

[wuffi]

Thanks for your reply and having implemented it in kable.
I think this is what I will use.

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