Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!djs
From: djs@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (David J. Sturman)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: LaTeX figure \caption question
Message-ID: <3281@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 1 Sep 90 14:40:35 GMT
References: <BJR.90Aug30155525@clarity.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: djs@media-lab.media.mit.edu (David J. Sturman)
Distribution: comp
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 42

In article <BJR.90Aug30155525@clarity.Princeton.EDU> bjr@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Brian J. Reiser) writes:
>Is there any simple way to modify the formatting of latex figure
>captions?  I have some longish captions (approx 3-4 sentences) that

I had the same problem and solved it by defining my own caption macro for
LaTeX, shown below.  It provides a multi-line caption centered and .25
inches shorter than the currently operating paragraph width, in a slightly
smaller font.  The macros take two arguments, the caption title that gets
put into a table of contents, and the paragraph of text that should follow.
Note that the first argument, the 'caption title', is not printed with the
figure so that you have to repeat the title in the second argument.
The macro is:

\newcommand{\mycaption}[2]{
	\begin{center}
		\advance\textwidth by -0.5in
		\parbox{\the\textwidth}{
			\caption[#1]{\small #2 \normalsize}
		} % end of parbox
	\end{center}
} % end of newcommand

You use it in the following way.  The caption is "My caption title" and I
have it printing out in italics (\em).

\begin{figure}
\label{a-nice-figure}
\psfig{figure=a-nice-figure.ps}
\mycaption
{My caption title} {{\em My caption title}\ \ This is a long paragraph that
is to be put as comment to the caption of a figure in a document.  It can
go on and on...
...
...
and ends here }
\end{figure}

Good luck.

David Sturman
MIT Media Lab
djs@media-lab.media.mit.edu