How to cross-reference figures in text

[Bogdan Marcu]

When editing content including graphic figures with a caption such as "Figure 9. Statistical Distribution of  Y", I need to refer the figure in the text, for example

"The statistical distribution of Y is shown in Figure 9", where Figure 9 is a cross-reference link which allow the dynamic change of figure number if I modify the text and introduce another figure above the existing figure 9, in such case Figure 9 is automatically renumbered to Figure 10, and the cross-reference link is updated to Figure 10, instead of Figure 9.

Is it possible?

[Bill Bailey · Accepted solution]

Generally, numbered figures and tables are a print concept, and not recommended in an HTML context.

You could add an anchor in front of your figure (with a unique name, then link to that anchor). You link text can just be figure or you could be more formal as Figure:<figure_title>.

You COULD create a user macro to stylize a figure title (not use the caption function), then write CSS that will auto number the figure titles for you. Alternatively, you could rewrite the CSS for the caption function BUT it would impact all pages in a space.

Either way, It would work as you say, renumbering as you insert new figures. BUT there is no way to dynamically update the link text (without a lot of work)

[Bogdan Marcu]

Thank you Bill, your answer is much appreciated. Perhaps this is also food for thought for the Atlassian development teams, as more and more corporation use Confluence wiki's to document their various processes. 

[Rodney Hughes]

Hello 

We use a plug in from Bolo

https://bolosoftware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/196688/Numbered+Captions

Each Captioned Item has its own auto-generated Anchor (or you can enter your own)

Then with Caption Reference using that anchor name, the page text is auto-updated as you add images above the first one

e.g. You can set the Caption Name as "Figure 1 -" which will give the Caption sequence 

Or you can set Caption Name as "Table 1 -" which then gives 

Figure 1 - 1

Figure 1 - 2

Table 1 - 1

Figure 1 - 3

Table 1 - 2

You can then use their "Table of Figures" to create a listing of those according to the Caption name format

My only annoyance is that if you have to Export the page to Word, the caption hyperlinks aren't retained as such because Word obviously uses a different cross-reference system for its captions