Remove automatic table headline

Question

I use LaTeX for creating PDF output from R - not to create long documents. Hence the automatic Table 1: <caption> above the table is rather annoying. How can I remove the automatically generated Table 1:? Is it at all possible?

Answer 1

Use the caption package with the labelformat=empty option:

\documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{article}

\usepackage[labelformat=empty]{caption}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{lll}
1 & 2 & 3 \\
a & b & c
\end{tabular}
\caption{Some super-secret data.}
\end{table}

\end{document}

Answer 2

In the standard document class (article, book and report), \@makecaption actually prints the float caption based on two arguments: The first is the float type (\@captype) and the second is the actual caption. If the removal of the float-specific addition is general (that is, for table, figure and others), then a redefinition of \@makecaption would suffice:

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
% Taken from http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/unpacked/article.cls
\long\def\@makecaption#1#2{%
  \vskip\abovecaptionskip
  \sbox\@tempboxa{#2}% \sbox{\@tempboxa{#1: #2}
  \ifdim \wd\@tempboxa >\hsize
    #2\par% #1: #2\par
  \else
    \global \@minipagefalse
    \hb@xt@\hsize{\hfil\box\@tempboxa\hfil}%
  \fi
  \vskip\belowcaptionskip}
\makeatother
\begin{document}

\begin{table}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{lll}
    1 & 2 & 3 \\
    a & b & c
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{Some super-secret data.}
\end{table}

\end{document}

In the above redefinition, the first argument #1 is still read, but not used, and therefore removed from the caption.