atw: Re: Caption placement

Software manuals and engineering manuals, which most of us write, are not exactly either books or scientific/academic papers, but the typesetting conventions in those fields obviously influence us. I suggest that rather than seek for universal rules, we should consider our readers. Consistency of presentation is important, but ease of reading should influence the conventions we use.
If all of the tables and figures are small (occupying only a small fraction of a page), and simple in appearance, then it doesn't matter much whether the captions are above or below the objects. When you are looking at the table or figure, the caption will always be in the periphery of vision, and searching for the caption is not hard.
If the tables are long, and are very likely to break over a page end, then the captions should come before the tables, and should have a continuation tag at the bottom of each page and a repeating caption at the top of the next page. (Yes, I know you can't do that automatically with Word.) Such a caption/ system is easy for the reader to find and follow.
Large figures occupying most of a page should also be preceded by their captions; again, to make the captions easy to find. Some publishing packages support multi-page figures made up of several sub- figures, which may be large, each with a sub-caption. To make it easy to find the captions and sub-captions, they should precede their respective figures and sub-figures. 

A contributor to this thread observed that -
"The caption includes explanations for labelled elements and perhaps of the overall figure..."
-but this appears to conflate two different entities, "caption" and "legend". If your figures have legends, then it would be reasonable to place the legends in consistent positions with respect to the figures, throughout the manual. If the reader will not understand a figure without knowing what the colours/hatchings/symbols mean, then put the legend near the top of the figure.
Consistency within a single manual or manual suite is useful, but typesetting conventions are often nationally based.
We are quite used to titles and captions where a word precedes the number part: for example, Chapter 1, Table 45, Figure 6, Example 2,... In Hungarian documents, the order is reversed. [Native speakers may have to imagine the acute accents in the following.] "Part II" becomes "II. rész" , "Table 6" becomes "6. táblázat", and so on. 

There is more than one way to be consistent...

James Hunt
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On 06 Dec 2006, at 8:31 PM, Allan Charlton wrote:


Hi Debbie
I think you'll find it's standard practice in academic documents. Look at the scientific journals, the conferences, and so on. If I'm pressed, I can find a link to the APA style guide, but any university library shouyld have a link. Try http://library.uws.edu.au/citing.phtml for a start. You might have to search a bit from the library site. If you get stuck, mail me. 

Allan
allancharlton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Debbie Hope wrote:
The 'house' style of my current workplace dictates captions in documents are placed *above* a table and *below* a figure / graphic. 

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