Since the HTML standard does not have a “caption” attribute for the img element, Flare doesn’t either. There is a caption sub element, but it only works nested inside of a table.

We can still use image captions, of course, they are just a little more work. Your image captions will simply be a paragraph with a particular style applied. We then wrap both that paragraph and the paragraph containing the image in a div that prevents the two from separating as they break across pages in print outputs.

Caption Numbering

The p.Figure style that you will apply to your caption paragraph will autonumber with the chapter and image count. In the XML Editor, all of these look like they are in Chapter 1 of an output, but this is just placeholder information. At build time these images will be dynamically numbered in sequence.

Manually Captioning an Image

1. Place your cursor at the end of the paragraph containing the image you want to caption and press Enter to get a new paragraph.
2. Type the content of the caption.
   • This content should be descriptive of the image but does not have to start with “This image”, just go straight to the point.
   • Sentence fragments are acceptable in captions as they are essentially labels.
3. Click to select the caption paragraph.
4. Click the Style dropdown selector in the Home Ribbon and choose the p.Figure style. The Figure X.Y prefix should apply to the paragraph.
5. Select both the image and caption paragraphs and click the Group icon in the Home Ribbon.
   
6. Select div.printunit from the Create group window.
   
   You will see both paragraphs now nested inside the div.

Do I need to Caption Every Image?

In short, no. If it is clear from the context why the image is there and you do not need to cross reference it from another location, you can likely skip captioning. Images in steps do not generally need captions. However, note that longer form documents have a list of images in the appendix and only captioned images will be added to that list.

Use Starter Elements

The smaller version of reusable content in Flare, snippets, have a second usage. Normally, you insert snippets and do not make changes to them. However, you can also use them as mini templates for objects that you use over and over. We have created some special snippets for just this use case.

This starter element will place an image into your topic already followed by a p.Figure paragraph and wrapped in a div.printunit div.

1. Place the cursor in the empty paragraph where you want to create the caption image. Do this before entering any of the content that goes into the note.
2. Click the Snippet dropdown selector in the XML Editor and select More Snippets from the dropdown selector.
   
3. Select the Empty_Image_wCaption snippet.
   
4. Click OK.
5. Right click the snippet you just inserted and select Convert to Text from the context menu.
   
6. Right click the placeholder image and select Image Properties.
7. Browse to and select your image, then click OK to replace the placeholder.
8. Click into the caption paragraph and replace the placeholder text with your caption. The prefix will apply after you add content.