Can figure caption be made to align with bottom of text area?

Question

Possibly this is properly a question for the typesetting group, but ...

I wonder if it might look better if the captions on figures set at the bottom of a page were less "off" from the bottom text margin. Is this desired or even possible, or is my OCD showing here? The captions seem to be about 1/2 line above the margin, compared to the unbalanced-looking columns here. It looks to me as if the caption text hangs from the baseline, vs. verse text which sits on the baseline.

I've tried playing with the vertical spacing factors in the \fig style, but these didn't seem to affect the placement.

(I notice that figs in the NT for this language, which was typeset some years ago with PA and InDesign, shows the same alignment, so this question is probably just a theoretical one. But I wouldn't mind hearing others' opinions, if you have time to opine. :) Thanks!

Answer 1

You're right, figure captions normally have a 0.5 baseline gap underneath them. That's hard-coded. However, we do have the spaceafter control that would let you put in a "-0.5 baseline"  gap to counteract it.
If it's just a one-off which needs tweaking, then assuming you can persuade the user interface to let you insert it, then you'd need to add an x-spaceafter="-0.5" to the piclist entry. You can  abuse the "extra" field for this;  entering something like:

" x-spaceafter="-0.5

into it. Yes, I mean the quotations and spaces exactly as they are, as it gets 'extra="' prepended and '"' appended.

However, there should also be a way to make the setting to all figures in a certain location, which sounds much more like what you want, via the stylesheet. You can almost get it right via the style menu, but not quite. Manual stylesheet entry:

\Marker loc:bX|fig
\SpaceAfter -0.5

This sets the SpaceAfter for all figures at bottom-left or right to be -0.5.

Unfortunately, the way the code interprets the units is incompatible with the SpaceAfter value for paragraphs (units of 1/12 of a line), and so to get the user interface to give you a value close to 0.5 in that field, you need to set the Space After Factor to -0.04 (which is multiplied by 12 to give -0.48).

Comments

ignore the loc:blfig*  endmarker in the heading of that box, sorry. Historic typo, and it's wrong anyway.