Subfig no space between figures and double brackets

Question

I followed the instructions here to make subfigures http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

However there were no space between the figure and I got double brackets for the captions. I cannot find any instruction on the Internet. I hope anyone can help me here.

My code is like this

\begin{figure}[H]
  \centering
  \subfloat[a]{\label{fig:a}\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth,height=15em]{appendix/1.jpg}}
  \subfloat[b]{\label{fig:b}\includegraphics[height=15em]{solution.jpg}}     
  \caption[The short caption]{The long caption}
  \label{fig:preparation}
\end{figure}

------- Update --------

Problem solved! For the spacing I used \qquad and for double brackets, I found out that I have both packages subfigure and subfig enabled. I deleted package subfigure then I get single brackets as expected.

Thank you all for helping me solve this problem!

Answer 1

The syntax of the subfloat command is

\subfloat[list-of-floats-caption][subcaption]{body}

The subcaption part is not used for the numbering of the subcaptions (which is done automatically). You should only use the first optional argument if you need a different caption inside the list of floats.

So to get just (a) and (b) you should use:

\subfloat[]{\label{fig:a}\includegraphics[width=.5textwidth,height=15em]{appendix/1.jpg}}

You need to insert space manually between the two \subfloat commands. You can do this with \qquad or any other horizontal spacing command such as \hfil or \hspace{}.

Here's a minimal example to show what I did. (In future, you should ask your questions by providing an full example like this instead of just a fragment.) Your "double" brackets are coming from somewhere else.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{subfig}
\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[H]
  \centering
  \subfloat[A sub caption]{\label{fig:a}\includegraphics[width=.2\textwidth,height=15em]{appendix/1.jpg}}
  \qquad
  \subfloat[A sub caption]{\label{fig:b}\includegraphics[width=.2\textwidth,height=15em]{solution.jpg}}     
  \caption[The short caption]{The long caption}
  \label{fig:preparation}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Answer 2

I had the same problem. The way to get rid of the double brackets and turn ((a)) into (a) is to simply include the subcaption package.

\usepackage{subcaption}