Footnotes in captions

Footnotes in captions are especially tricky: they present problems of their own, on top of the problems one experiences with footnotes in section titles and with footnotes in tables. Fortunately, the requirement for footnotes in captions is extremely rare: if you are experiencing problems, it is worth reviewing what you are trying to say by placing this footnote. Note that the threeparttable scheme (see, again, footnotes in tables) also applies to notes in captions, and may very well be preferable to whatever you were thinking of.

If you are going to proceed:

so we have:
\begin{figure}
  \begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
    ...
    \caption[Caption for LOF]%
      {Real caption\footnote{blah}}
  \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

However, as well as all of the above, one also has to deal with the tendency of the \caption command to produce the footnote’s text twice. For this last problem, there is no tidy solution this author is aware of.

If you’re suffering the problem, a well-constructed \caption command in a minipage environment within a float (as in the example above) can produce two copies of the footnote body “blah”. (In fact, the effect only occurs with captions that are long enough to require two lines to be typeset, and so wouldn’t appear with such a short caption.)

The documentation of the ccaption package describes a really rather awful work-around.

ccaption.sty
macros/latex/contrib/ccaption (gzipped tar, browse)
threeparttable.sty
macros/latex/contrib/misc/threeparttable.sty

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ftncapt