Space between table caption and caption text

Question

At the moment, I have the following code in the preamble:

\usepackage[justification=justified,singlelinecheck=false]{caption}
\captionsetup{format=hang, labelsep=quad}

This creates a nice space between the table caption and the caption text. However, I would also like to add a colon after the table number, and at the same time have the separation between the colon and the caption text. As far as I know, \captionsetup only allows one attribute for labelsep. Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. The caption package provides the command \DeclareCaptionLabelSeparator to define your own caption label separator.

So, declaring

\DeclareCaptionLabelSeparator{mysep}{:\quad}

and using

\captionsetup{format=hang, labelsep=mysep}

you can obtain what you want.

MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage[justification=justified,singlelinecheck=false]{caption}
\DeclareCaptionLabelSeparator{mysep}{:\quad}
\captionsetup{format=hang, labelsep=mysep}
\begin{document}

\begin{table}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{c}
    \hline
    hello \\
    \hline
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{A table}
\end{table}

\end{document} 

Answer 2

As far as I know captions of tables go above the table. If you do this, you can just add a little space to the line separator \\ like this:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

 \begin{table}
   \centering
   \caption{A table} %captions go atop of a table
  \begin{tabular}{c}
   \\[1pt]  %This is the important part
   \hline
    hello \\
   \hline
  \end{tabular}
 \end{table}

\end{document} 

Hope this helps!