Adding a caption to an equation in LaTeX

Question

Well  it seems simple enough  but I can t find a way to add a caption to an equation  The caption is needed to explain the variables used in the equation  so some kind of table-like structure to keep it all aligned and pretty would be great

User · Answer

You may want to look at http   tug ctan org tex-archive macros latex contrib float  which allows you to define new floats using  newfloat  I say this because captions are usually applied to floats   Straight ahead equations  those written with                     begin equation      are in-line objects that do not support  caption   This can be done using the following snippet just before  begin document    usepackage float   usepackage aliascnt   newaliascnt eqfloat  equation   newfloat eqfloat  h  eqflts   floatname eqfloat  Equation    newcommand   ORGeqfloat     let ORGeqfloat eqfloat  def eqfloat      let ORIGINALcaption caption    def caption        addtocounter equation  -1        ORIGINALcaption         ORGeqfloat     and when adding an equation use something like   begin eqfloat   begin equation  f  x     ax   b  label eq linear   end equation   caption Caption goes here   end eqfloat

User · Answer

The  caption command is restricted to floats  you will need to place the equation in a figure or table environment  or a new kind of floating environment   For example    begin figure     E   m c 2     caption A famous equation   end figure    The point of floats is that you let LaTeX determine their placement  If you want to equation to appear in a fixed position  don t use a float  The  captionof command of the caption package can be used to place a caption outside of a floating environment  It is used like this      E   m c 2     captionof figure  A famous equation    This will also produce an entry for the  listoffigures  if your document has one   To align parts of an equation  take a look at the eqnarray environment  or some of the environments of the amsmath package  align  gather  multiline

User · Answer

As in this forum post by Gonzalo Medina  a third way may be   documentclass article   usepackage caption    DeclareCaptionType equ        captionsetup equ  labelformat empty    begin document   Some text   begin equ   ht     begin equation      a b c    end equation   caption Caption of the equation   end equ   Some other text    end document   More details of the commands used from package caption  here  A screenshot of the output of the above code

[latex] Adding a caption to an equation in LaTeX

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