How to place subfigure caption on the side?

Question

Is there some way to tell subfig package to place subfigure captions to the left or to the right of subfigures? There is sidecap package which does it for the main captions, but it does not affect subfigure captions.

Or, if subfig does not have this options, which way to do it is the best? I tried to use tabular environment inside the figure, but there were some problems with alignment inside cells.

Answer 1

The subcaption package offers a command called \subcaption which typesets a sub-caption alone and has the same syntax as \caption. You can place this command where you want, i.e. also beside a figure.

Addendum 2011-01-19, Example code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{caption,subcaption}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\parbox[b]{.5\linewidth}{\Large
Insert picture here --
Insert picture here --
Insert picture here --
Insert picture here}%
\hspace{.1\linewidth}%
\parbox[b]{.4\linewidth}{%
\subcaption{This is just a short document to show that
we can place the sub-caption where we want to.}}
\caption{Main caption.}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

Furthermore the floatrow package offers stuff like that (and more).

Answer 2

I found the solution with tabular environment, which is a bit messy, but works. It is based on this StackOverflow thread.

\def\imagetop#1{\vtop{\null\hbox{#1}}}

\begin{figure}
    \begin{tabular}{l l}
    \imagetop{\includegraphics{figure1.eps}} & \imagetop{(a)} \\
    \imagetop{\includegraphics{figure2.eps}} & \imagetop{(b)}
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Main caption.}
\end{figure}