RTL captions with newfloat?

Question

Is it that the float package begins to show its age? I cannot get it to work right with XeLaTeX. Here is an example:

\documentclass{article} % compile with xelatex
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{polyglossia} 
  \setmainlanguage{hebrew} 
  \setotherlanguage{english}
  \newfontfamily\hebrewfont[Script=Hebrew]{Ezra SIL}% or{SBL Hebrew}

\newfloat{thingy}{htbp}{lot}[section]
\begin{document}
  \begin{thingy}
    \[ E = m c^2 \]
    \begin{hebrew}\setRTL\caption{This caption should be set RTL}\end{hebrew}
 \end{thingy}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Version 1.1.6 of the bidi package (available today on CTAN and perhaps tomorrow by updating TeXLive 2010) adds support for the float package and hence captions inside RTL mode will be RTL and captions inside LTR mode will be LTR. Your code should be changed into:

\documentclass{article} % compile with xelatex
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{polyglossia} 
  \setmainlanguage{hebrew} 
  \setotherlanguage{english}
  \newfontfamily\hebrewfont[Script=Hebrew]{Ezra SIL}% or{SBL Hebrew}

\newfloat{thingy}{htbp}{lot}[section]
\begin{document}
  \begin{thingy}
    \[ E = m c^2 \]
    \caption{This caption should be set RTL}
 \end{thingy}
\end{document}

So this clearly means that you do not need to surround \caption by a hebrew environment and \setRTL command.