Figure and Table next to each other in IEEEtrans with specific caption style

Question

I'm looking for a solution where I can put a figure and a table next to one another in the IEEEtrans document class (2 columns). Each should have its own caption, so subfloat can't be used and, the table needs to have its specific IEEE caption style.

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

You can use two minipages of 0.45 columnwidth side by side.

Because inside a minipage floating environments (such as table or figure) are not allowed, the tabular and includegraphics commands should be used without the surrounding environments.

To indicate which type of float it is and to provide captions and labels, you can use \captionof from the capt-of package (note that the caption package also provides captionof, but that package is incompatible with IEEEtran).

Finally, you can put both minipages together in a float without a caption (for example a figure), to float to the top and provide some vertical space as specified by the IEEE style.

MWE:

\documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{capt-of}
\begin{document}
\setcounter{table}{1}
\setcounter{figure}{1}
See Figure \ref{fig:redundant} and Table \ref{tab:states}.
\lipsum[1]
\begin{figure}
\begin{minipage}{0.45\columnwidth}
\centering\fbox{this is a figure}
\captionof{figure}{Redundant system $s_t$ with a redundant caption that spans multiple lines}
\label{fig:redundant}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{0.45\columnwidth}
\centering\fbox{this is a table}
\captionof{table}{Redundancy states of $o_2 \in \mathcal{O}^{\psi_1}_{\phi_1}$}
\label{tab:states}
\end{minipage}
\end{figure}
\lipsum[1-10]
\end{document}

Result: