Latex label/ref for "fake" external figure

Question

some journals require each figure to be submitted in a separate document. However, they do want the figure legends to be listed in the main document.

I was thus hoping to do something along these lines:

\section{Figure Legends}
\begin{description} 
 \item[Figure \ref{fig:fireAntBiology}] \label{fig:fireAntBiology} bla bla ants
\end{description}

This would still permit to \ref the figure from the main text. However, it doesn't work (The \ref returns the number of section "Figure Legends"). The following correctly gives a different number to each "figure":

\item[Figure \ref{fig:fireAntBiology}] \begin{figure} \caption{\label{fig:fireAntBiology}} \end{figure} bla bla ants

However, it also places empty figure floats throughout the document.

A solution should be straightforward. What am I missing? Any ideas?

Thanks! yannick

Answer 1

I would just use the endfloat package and split the resulting pdf in two separate documents for submission. Endfloat takes care of all the references and puts all the floats at the end of your document.

Answer 2

hmmmm one thing that sort of works is:

\section{Figure Legends}
\begin{figure}[!h]
  \caption{\label{fig:fireAntBiology} bla bla ants}
\end{figure}

But then I need to struggle with Latex's random float placement...

Answer 3

Another possible solution would be to define the labels manually with the \newlabel command in the preamble of the document. For example:

\newlabel{fig:fireAntBiology}{{1}{}}

Would replace all \ref{fig:fireAntBiology} with 1. The obvious downside is that you now have to manually find the correct number for each figure, but it may work as a quick-and-dirty one-off solution.