Change the font of figure captions

Question

I would like to italicize my figure captions and make them smaller. How can I do that?

score 147 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 19 '18 at 13:31

147

It can be done by loading the caption package and by choosing options or \captionsetup, for instance:

\usepackage[font={small,it}]{caption}

The caption package provides a lot more feature and is very well documented.

edited Mar 19 '18 at 13:31

DilithiumMatrix

answered Aug 02 '10 at 16:56

Stefan Kottwitz

3

How can you make it even smaller? – Malabarba Dec 15 '10 at 22:29
15

Instead of small, you could choose footnotesize or scriptsize as property for the font option. – Stefan Kottwitz Dec 15 '10 at 22:42
1

Is there a simple way to get a size in between footnotesize and small? Small is just slightly to big. – Marten Jun 19 '14 at 20:07
2

what is the size of small? is it relative to the main font size? – Ahmad May 25 '16 at 15:18
This affect the cls's provided color for the caption, is it possible to prevent the color change? – alper Dec 07 '22 at 23:40

score 30 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 02 '11 at 13:33

30

KOMA-Script provides commands for customizing fonts of certain elements:

The latter can be used for using the configured font for further elements. Among the supported elements are caption and captionlabel.

So here we could write:

\setkomafont{caption}{\footnotesize\itshape}
\setkomafont{captionlabel}{\usekomafont{caption}}

figure with smaller italic caption

answered Oct 02 '11 at 13:33

Stefan Kottwitz

1

This answer requires familiarity with KOMA-Script. I went through the manual and I still don't understand whether I should use a certain package or what a minimum working example looks like. – kon psych May 08 '15 at 07:08
2

@kon I use scrartcl as document class, and it was very easy to apply. Just put the two lines in the header, no extra package necessary. – luckyrumo Jun 27 '15 at 22:19
3

While it’s probably obvious to most, captionlabel is “Figure X” (at the left) and caption is your actual caption text (to the right). – caw Jul 29 '19 at 20:11

score 13 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 03 '10 at 19:06

The memoir document class has this baked in. The provided functionality allows adjustments to the following parameters:

And much more. See section 10.6 of the memoir manual for full details.

Memoir also includes support for things such as sub-captions and side-captions. Chapter 10 of the manual describes all this and much more.

3 Answers3