Feature request: more manual control of figure/table caption numbering

[lbramley]

It would be great to have more manual control over figure and table caption numbering - specifically, to be able to restart numbering and to add a prefix. Many journals allow the inclusion of supplementary materials but captions need to be marked as e.g. "Supplementary table X:" and the numbers need to restart from 1. Ideally it'd need to work for the bookdown::word_document2 format as journals often require submission as a .docx.

This has been asked as well by others on StackOverflow, but I didn't see any answers, so I'm assuming it'd be a feature request.

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[vkehayas]

I am also interested in this feature. In addition to the above-mentioned questions, I found this answer in SO that works for Supplementary figures in PDF output but not for HTML/DOCX:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/51337664

[rikudoukarthik]

Commenting here to emphasise that this is a much-needed feature; I feel it cannot be overstated how prevalent .docx manuscripts are in lieu of .pdf in some of the fields I'm aware of.

I see that it's been a few years since this issue was opened (and a bit more since questions have come in on SO), so I wonder if it can be given slightly higher priority? As it stands, this is one of two things that's preventing my manuscript-writing process from becoming fully reproducible.

[yihui]

Actually this has been possible since bookdown v0.22 (PR #1120), but as I tried to use a custom function to reformat the caption numbers, I found a problem that's not easy for me to fix. Please see #1427 for details. If you don't cross-reference those figures/tables with custom numbering, you should be fine.

[rikudoukarthik]

Thanks @yihui. Unfortunately, supplementary items very often get cross-referenced in the main text, so that feature is rather important. But regardless, I think #1427 is definitely better than nothing.