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I use more verbose captions lately. It makes the figures be comprehensible on their own. The running text is shorter; The passage is mostly copy-pasted into the

by qznc 14y ago

I use more verbose captions lately. It makes the figures be comprehensible on their own. The running text is shorter; The passage is mostly copy-pasted into the caption.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
The caption approach often doesn't work very well in prose. The reader doesn't really want to divert their attention to a long caption, which interrupts their reading of a paragraph, if they bother they might have a hard time going back to where they left off after they've taken in the caption. This is why captions should be fairly short, especially when your reader is a reviewer who is not specifically interested in reading your paper. I actually prefer inlining my figures into the paragraph text, especially if they are short or math oriented. Reference becomes harder, but the reader's flow is better preserved. Now, we can avoid that problem by moving to an illustrated comic book style (as done in Bret's example), where the figures become the story and panels are read in lieu of prose. But its very difficult to do a whole paper like this.
- qznc 14y ago
  Reader flow is not a problem, if the figure+caption is used to make a point, which can be skipped for flow. Example from a recent publication [0], where the actual figure is not necessary, so the reader's flow is not broken: > The libFirm API provides serialization and deserialization support for the intermediate representation graphs. As can be seen in Figure 3, it is therefore possible to compile the C part of the standard library with cparser, stop before actual code generation and instead export the intermediate representation to a file. I believe most readers (e.g. me) look the figures first, so I want the figures to be comprehensible on their own. [0] http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000028112 http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000028112

by qznc 14y ago

I use more verbose captions lately. It makes the figures be comprehensible on their own. The running text is shorter; The passage is mostly copy-pasted into the caption.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

The caption approach often doesn't work very well in prose. The reader doesn't really want to divert their attention to a long caption, which interrupts their reading of a paragraph, if they bother they might have a hard time going back to where they left off after they've taken in the caption. This is why captions should be fairly short, especially when your reader is a reviewer who is not specifically interested in reading your paper. I actually prefer inlining my figures into the paragraph text, especially if they are short or math oriented. Reference becomes harder, but the reader's flow is better preserved. Now, we can avoid that problem by moving to an illustrated comic book style (as done in Bret's example), where the figures become the story and panels are read in lieu of prose. But its very difficult to do a whole paper like this.

qznc 14y ago
Reader flow is not a problem, if the figure+caption is used to make a point, which can be skipped for flow. Example from a recent publication [0], where the actual figure is not necessary, so the reader's flow is not broken: > The libFirm API provides serialization and deserialization support for the intermediate representation graphs. As can be seen in Figure 3, it is therefore possible to compile the C part of the standard library with cparser, stop before actual code generation and instead export the intermediate representation to a file. I believe most readers (e.g. me) look the figures first, so I want the figures to be comprehensible on their own. [0] http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000028112 http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000028112