LaTeX figure output proposal & discussion.

[argent0]

I'm repeating this in a different thread to encourage discussion.

There exist the packages caption and subcaption that enable subfigures

Click to expand example

\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{subcaption}
...
\begin{figure}
     \begin{subfigure}[b]{0.5\textwidth}
		Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod

     	\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.5\textwidth}
			\centering
			This.
         	\caption{Inner 1.1}
     	\end{subfigure}
     	\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.5\textwidth}
			\centering
			That.
         	\caption{Inner 1.2}
     	\end{subfigure}
         \caption{Inner 1}
         \label{fig:inner1}
     \end{subfigure}
     \begin{subfigure}[b]{0.5\textwidth}
		Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
         \caption{$Inner 2$}
         \label{fig:inner2}
     \end{subfigure}
        \caption{Outer caption}
        \label{fig:outer}
\end{figure}

The caption package plays well with latex's default classes(book, report, article) and beamer and thesis.

But is not installed in the default ubuntu package. It is on ubuntu on this package.

One idea would be to include figure support as an extension, in this way you would only get sub figure support when you require it (but would still need the texlive-extra package installed.

Custom floats

The previous figure and subfigure seem to specifically represent images.

It's also possible to define custom floats, but again it is important to note that those can't be nested.

About nesting

Ideally we would like to have something like:

\begin{foo}
	...arbitrary latex content ...
\end{foo}

Unfortunately LaTeX doesn't allow this in most cases. So I see two alternatives:

1. We limit nesting in the output: We set a limit to some N. But later latex
   versions may change in behavior requiring a pandoc update.

2. We produce arbitrarily nested output. That, although semantically correct,
   isn't valid LaTeX.

[cderv]

I think there is also other option like Subfig package (https://www.ctan.org/pkg/subfig). We use that in rmarkdown when doing multiple figure. Example in: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-subfigure.html
However caption would still be needed I think and the limitation of the available package still remains.

About nested output, at some point, minipage package needs to be used to organize sub figures correctly.
Something like this for several figures

\begin{figure}
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.50\linewidth}
{\centering 
\raisebox{-\height}{
\includegraphics{plot1.png}
}
\caption{plot 1}
}
\end{minipage}%
%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.50\linewidth}
{\centering 
\raisebox{-\height}{
\includegraphics{plot1.png}
}
\caption{plot 1 again}
}
\end{minipage}%
\newline
\begin{minipage}[t]{1.00\linewidth}
{\centering 
\raisebox{-\height}{
\includegraphics{plot1.png}
}
\caption{Plot 1 again as I have only this one}
}
\end{minipage}%
\end{figure}

or like this using subfloat with main caption

\begin{figure}
\subfloat[A plot]{\label{fig11}%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.50\linewidth}
\raisebox{-\height}{
{\centering 
\includegraphics{plot1.png}
}
}\end{minipage}%
}
%
\subfloat[Another plot]{\label{fig12}%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.50\linewidth}
\raisebox{-\height}{
{\centering 
\includegraphics{plot1.png}
}
}\end{minipage}%
}
\caption{\label{fig1}Some plots}
\end{figure}

Does that help ?

I am not sure if I understood correctly where we are at currently . 😄

[argent0]

Yes this is very helpful. I think the first iteration would limit the depth to 2 and flatten anything deeper.