The short and long caption titles of the question should work fine. A typical problem with caption titles for the list of figures is that fragile macros can break. Then they can be protected by \protect
. Example, if \foobar
is such a macro, then it is protected the following way:
\caption[Some text \protect\foobar]{Long caption text}
Another typical problem is, when stuff in the optional argument also contains optional arguments or square brackets. TeX does not check for matched square brackets unlike it does with curly braces. Then they can be protected by curly braces, e.g.:
\caption[{Some [short] text}]{Long caption text}
The following example shows, that the caption of the question does not cause problems. The only macro is \pm
, which is not fragile, when defined by LaTeX.
Also the example shows the usage of package siunitx
for the number, a powerful package for numbers, units and both. It takes care of formatting and spaces.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{siunitx}
\begin{document}
\listoffigures
\begin{figure}
\caption[short title $\pm$ 10$^{5}$]{long title for text}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\caption[short title \num{+-e5}]{long title for text}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

\caption[short title \protect $\pm$...]
$\pm 10^{5}$
. It's one piece of math, use just one math environment.