Adding in captions for subfigures leads to completely separate figures rather than labels like (a) or (b)

Question

I have a figure in my LaTeX file with two subfigures. I want to add a label to each subfigure like (a) and (b) while maintaining an overall description of the figure below.

The code that I have is like this:

\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{subcaption}
\begin{figure}[!t]
    \begin{subfigure}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[trim={0, 50, 0, 0}, width=0.5\textwidth]{figures/plot1.pdf}
        \caption{Caption 1} \label{fig:1a}
    \end{subfigure}
    \begin{subfigure}
        \centering
        \includegraphics[trim={0, 50, 0, 0}, width=0.5\textwidth]{figures/plot2.pdf}
        \caption{Caption 2} \label{fig:2a}
    \end{subfigure}
\caption{Something.}
\label{fig:figure2}
\end{figure}

However, this produces the following:

As you can see, this is not at all what I want. How should I go about maintaining the two subfigures side by side while adding labels beneath them? Thanks.

You also probably want [clip=true]. – John Kormylo Mar 07 '21 at 01:55 — John Kormylo, Mar 07 '21 at 01:55

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 07 '21 at 00:24

To achieve the correct labeling for subfigures, you have to use \subcaption instead of the regular \caption.

Also, the subfigure environment takes another obligatory argument for its width. If you set that to .5\textwidth or less for both figures, they should appear side by side.

Adding in captions for subfigures leads to completely separate figures rather than labels like (a) or (b)

1 Answers1