Commutative Diagrams in Table of Figures

Question

Should one treat commutative diagrams as figures within the figure environment? If not, is there a way to add a label/caption and have the page number and caption show in the Table of Figures (without the figure environment)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If there aren't many of the diagrams, it's better to just use figure for all of them. If the number is significant and you want to distinguish them from other figures, you can use, for example, the float package to create a new type of floats:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{float}

\floatstyle{plain}
\newfloat{commut}{tbp}{loc}
\floatname{commut}{Commutative diagram}

\begin{document}

\begin{commut}
  \caption{Hello World}

  I am the content
\end{commut}

\listof{commut}{List of Commutative Diagrams}

\end{document}

Answer 2

If you treat them like figures (caption, entry in list of figures) you could also use a figure environment, that would just be consistent.

Regarding the placement, you still can customize it by options to the figure (some of !htbp). If they are small, they can be easily placed by LaTeX. If they are big, there's even more reason to let them float.

If you don't want them to float, you can use for example a minipage and the \captionof command of the caption package, such as

\captionof{figure}{Your diagram caption}

Here a minipage is good for keeping caption and diagram together without a page break between.

caption provides a \DeclareCaptionType command, you could use it to create diagram environments and a list of diagrams, if you like. Also even if you float instead, caption offers a lot of features and a great interface for customizing captions.