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Question

Caption: actual functionality

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 14, 2021
4 replies
1059 views

Just checking: is ID's static caption feature anything more than a script that groups a formatted text box with the graphics frame?

That is, does it do anything more than create the text box, apply the top offset, pop in placeholder text with the designated format, and group the two objects?

This topic has been closed for replies.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi together,

something I could not figure out with InDesign's Caption function:

I'd like to have a tab before the name of an image.

The usual candidates did not work:

Copy/paste a tabulator character to the input field.

^t

<0009>

All in all, still a half-baked feature…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi NitroPress,

if you have a script at hand that is doing the same or even more for you, use that script.

What both caption features in InDesign are missing: you cannot apply an object style to the caption's text frame.

To answer your question if the function does anything more: no.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

TᴀW

Legend

I've feature-requested an object style dropdown for captions a long time ago! It's mind-boggling that it wasn't included in version 1.0 of the feature, and still isn't there. With object styles the feature might actually become quite useable.

InDesign's UI should gently guide users to best practices. Not to have an object style option for captions is misleading, and suggests to users that object styles should be ignored -- the opposite is true of course.

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

The whole feature is, as I suspected and am sad to have confirmed, kind of a half-baked afterthought. Everything revolves around its ability to pull EXIF data, most of which is completely useless, and a bit of canned scripting to tack on a text box. No real format management, figure numbering control, organization or anything that would be so useful in a document with organized figures.

Oh, well.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @James Gifford—NitroPress:

A excellent use of generated captions (static or live) is to pull in the photo credit for an image. Photographers often fill in the metatdata (by loading a template) with their contact information before delivering images for use by others, so the info is already attached to the image. It is a timesaver to just generate "Photo by XXX." rather than having to draw a text frame, assign a style and add the text manually.

I find them predictable and not quirky with the sole exception of the absurdity that like varibles, live captions can't word wrap.

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/31023790-make-text-variables-live-captions-breakable-like-n

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

No argument to you or Bob on the usefulness of metadata — I already acknowledged that if you're working with a managed photo library. I can see magazines, large product blogs, catalogs etc. relying on a full process of tagged images.

But I just did a 450-page book with well over 200 photos, and between tagging all the images with a useful meta-caption and just managing the captions (as designed elements, not using the Caption feature), the latter proved to be much simpler. Which is where I've landed on projects large and small over the years.

I find ID's implementation to be... curious. I understand the Adobe mindset, but who on earth would REALLY want to caption a photo with "Effective PPI" outside of perhaps a tutorial? 🙂 The whole feature reminds me of something developed and included for some internal use, without much regard to wide-range real world use. (Anyone remember Borland Sprint? It had many features developed for Borland's internal documentation that were completely useless to third-party writers...)

Once again, my question was 'what am I overlooking?', and other than that Static captions also pull data, the answer was (usefully) 'nothing.' Thanks all.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

The only other "feature" that auto and static captions have is for tagging accessible PDFs. The <Caption> tag is nested inside the <Figure> tag:

blah blah

<Figure> image

<Caption> caption text

blah blah

It's the only method InDesign has to produce the <Caption> tag.

Unfortunately, most assistive technologies (none that I know of) can't recognize <Caption> as a child of <Figure> so they ignore the tag and its contents. This is one case of the international accessibiility standards being out of sync with reality.

The option to "Group Image with Caption" is only slightly better for accessibility: it puts the caption in a separate tag after the <Figure> tag, but it's a tag (not <Caption>) and it's nested inside a <Sect> tag for even more absurd, useless complexity.

blah blah

<Figure> image

<Sect>

caption text

blah blah

So much better to make all captions manually in InDesign where we can trick the system to produce a <Caption> tag in the right place within the tag tree.

So including the above comments about the feature's limited practical uses, we never use it because of the accessibility problems.

We consider it another half-baked utility within InDesign; we have the 1.0 version of it and have never seen more development of it.

It would be handy for basic STEM-Govt documents if we could use it to automate figure numbering. That would be really helpful, but I haven't seen anything in the caption settings to produce this. And we also could use the ability to create different "patterns" of information for different types of graphics, such as Figure 1 and Table 3.

Agree with @James Gifford—NitroPress's comments.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

Diane Burns

Inspiring

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure exactly what the question is here. The feature is also pulling metadata from the image as specified in Object menu > Captions > Caption Setup. And on a minor note, you can also specify the layer on which captions will be generated.

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Question is about static captions, not the live captions that can pull metadata. (Something for which I have yet to find use in over a decade, but I assume it's more useful for designers who work with organized photo libraries.)

The question is basically: does Generate Static Caption do anything that can't be replicated manually? It seems to be simply an automated/script sequence, doing nothing unique under the hood such as creating an index element.

EDIT: Ah, I never realized Static also pulls the specified metadata. So I guess there is one actual function buried in the feature. (Still not terribly useful; I have tried to use the Caption feature at intervals over the years and found it too weak and quirky to bother with.)

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

I believe they are both meant to pull text from an image's metadata. The main difference is that XMP captions with variables can auto-update (for example, from a caption editor with Adobe Bridge) while static captions do not.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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