Frank Drost wrote:
I would like to create a table of all my figures. All my
figures have the normal captions style, so I can easily
create such a table and all figures, text, pagenumbers etc
are correct. But some of my captions in my main document
are rather long. So these long captions show up in the
table as well. Rather that I shorten the real caption, I
only would like to shorten the wording of the caption as
it shows up in the table. How do I do that?

Hi Frank,

This is going to be a PITA no matter which way you approach it...

When you use the dialog to create a Table of Figures, it inserts a TOC field
with (among others) the switch
\c "Figure"
This picks up all the captions, which use a SEQ field with the "Figure"
identifier to create the figure numbers. There's no way to tell this widget
"oh, but on these few I want the short caption" -- either you get all the
long captions or you get none of them.

You can fake it out as follows:

- First, click the ¶ button so you can see hidden text. This will become
important in the next step.

- Go to the end of a long caption, and press Ctrl+F9 to insert a pair of
field braces { }. (Note that you can't just type braces on the keyboard, as
they won't work to make a field.) Between the braces, type this:

TC Figure Text of short caption

(of course, type your actual short caption there).

- Select the figure number from the beginning of the long caption (this is
actually a SEQ field) and drag it into the TC field after the word "Figure".
Then, in the long caption where the number used to be, type the figure
number as plain text.

- Repeat for all other long captions.

- Press ¶ again to turn off hidden text. The TC fields will be hidden.

- Select the whole document and press F9 to update it. When it asks about
the Table of Figures, tell it to update the entire table. The TOC will read
the short captions inside the TC fields, because they have the SEQ field
with the "Figure" identifier; and it will also read any regular captions
that haven't been altered this way.

This is where the PITA comes in: If you insert or remove figures, the
plain-text numbers in the long captions won't change to reflect that. You'll
have to go through all the captions, making manual changes to the long
caption numbers.

Maybe someone else will contribute a way that keeps the long caption numbers
in sync without also stuffing them into the TOC.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org