Farinha - 10 months ago 139
LaTeX Question

# Adding a caption to an equation in LaTeX

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.

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,...

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