Figures, Tables, and References

The supporting apparatus of a technical document — and the Week 4 LaTeX checkpoint

A short conceptual reading to accompany the Week 4 work on enriching a technical document. The hands-on walkthrough lives in Adding a Figure, Table, and Citation in Quarto.

Week 3 taught you to organize mathematical writing — setup, claim, example, justification. Week 4 adds the supporting apparatus that turns structured writing into something that looks and works like a small paper: a figure, a table, and a citation, with automatic cross-references tying them into the prose.

You stay in Quarto .qmd this week. You do not need raw .tex, \documentclass, a preamble, graphicx, or a bibliography package — Quarto produces figures, tables, citations, and cross-references for you and hands them to LaTeX when it renders to PDF. The new ideas are the document parts, not a new toolchain.

This is also a checkpoint week. The Week 4 LaTeX checkpoint conference confirms your core LaTeX skills are working and helps you pick a realistic LaTeX Project before the project block begins.

A technical document is more than prose and math

A page of correct prose and equations is not yet a technical document. Papers also show things (figures), organize things (tables), and stand on other work (references). These are not decoration — they carry information the prose cannot carry as well on its own, and a reader expects them.

Week 4’s job is to add that apparatus to the structured writing you can already do, at small scale: one figure, one table, one citation. The skill is making them work — captioned, numbered, referred to, and real.

Figures: showing, with a caption

A figure is something you show: a diagram, a sketch, a photo, an illustration. In a technical document a figure almost always carries a caption — a sentence below it that says what the figure is. The caption matters because a reader often looks at the figures first, and a good caption lets a figure be understood on its own.

This week, a figure is an included image — a picture file you put next to your document and include by name. (Plots generated from data with code come later in the course, when you start working in R.) The mechanics are simple: you point at an image file, give it a caption, and give it a label so you can refer to it by number.

A useful habit: every figure should be referred to in the prose (“as shown in Figure 1, …”). A figure that no sentence points at is usually a figure that should not be there.

Tables: structured comparison

A table organizes information into rows and columns so a reader can compare values at a glance — something prose does badly. Like a figure, a table gets a caption that says what it shows.

Keep tables small and readable. A table with three columns and a few rows communicates; a giant table that overflows the page does not. And, as with figures, a table should be referred to in the prose (“Table 1 summarizes …”).

Why technical work cites its sources

Technical writing cites the work it builds on: the paper a result comes from, the source of a definition, the reference behind a claim. Citing sources is partly about credit and partly about letting a reader follow the trail — and it is a habit your LaTeX Project will depend on, since that project replicates an existing paper.

A citation has two parts: a short in-text marker (which renders as something like a number or an author–year tag) and a full entry in a reference list at the end of the document.

What a `.bib` file does

You keep your references in a small plain-text file — a .bib file (BibTeX format). Each entry describes one source: its author, title, year, and so on, under a short key you choose. In your document you cite a source by its key, and the reference list at the end is generated automatically from the .bib entries you actually cited. You write the source once; the document formats and lists it for you.

For Week 4 this stays minimal: one entry, one citation, one auto-generated References section. You are learning the mechanism, not managing a hundred-source bibliography.

Cross-references: “see Figure 1,” automatically

When you refer to a figure or table, resist writing “the figure below” or “the table above.” Those phrases break the moment you move something or the renderer places it on a different page. Instead, give the figure or table a label and refer to it by an automatic cross-reference. The renderer fills in the right number — “Figure 1,” “Table 1” — and keeps it correct even if things move, with a clickable link in the HTML.

This is the cross-reference idea we held back in Week 3: now that you have figures and tables — the things you most need to point at — it earns its place. You only need figure and table cross-references this week; you do not need to cross-reference equations or sections.

Inspecting a rendered PDF for apparatus problems

Week 2 and Week 3 built the habit of rendering and looking at the PDF. Week 4 adds a short apparatus checklist to that habit. After you render, check:

The figure appears — not a broken-image box — and has its caption.
The table is readable and captioned, and does not overflow the page.
Every cross-reference resolves to a number. If you see “Figure ??” or “Table ??”, a label does not match its reference.
The in-text citation renders and a References section appears at the end, listing the source.
The cited source is real. (See the next section — this is the one a machine cannot check for you.)

A document that renders is not a document that is correct. The apparatus has to be right, and the only way to know is to read the rendered PDF.

AI can generate the syntax — but cannot verify the source

AI assistants are genuinely useful for Week 4 mechanics: drafting a .bib entry, formatting a table, suggesting a caption, or diagnosing a cross-reference that renders as ??. Use them as a first pass.

What AI cannot do is vouch for a source. Assistants routinely invent citations — a real-sounding author, title, journal, year, and even a DOI, for a paper that does not exist. The syntax will be perfect and the reference will be fake. A fabricated citation is the most serious Week 4 error.

So the course rule from Weeks 1–3 applies with a sharp Week-4 edge: AI is a first pass, not a verdict. Any reference an assistant gives you must be verified to be real — find the actual paper or book, confirm the author and title, and confirm a DOI or link resolves — and any cross-reference it sets up must be confirmed in the rendered PDF.

The three-line AI Use Note (Tool / Purpose / Verification) applies. For Week 4 the Verification line should describe how you confirmed your source is real and your cross-references resolve, for example:

Verification: confirmed the cited paper exists on the publisher’s site and the DOI resolved; rendered the PDF and confirmed the figure and table cross-references showed “Figure 1” / “Table 1” with no ??.

See the AI use guidelines for the full course position.

The Week 4 checkpoint, at a high level

Week 4 includes a required LaTeX checkpoint conference — a short, low-stakes conversation, not a test. Its purpose is to confirm your LaTeX skills are working, look over your figures/tables/references workflow, and help you choose a realistic LaTeX Project (a short replication of an open-access mathematics paper or excerpt) while there is still time to adjust the scope.

The most useful thing you can do beforehand is come with one candidate direction in mind: a paper, excerpt, or topic you might replicate, and a rough sense of how big it is. Conference sign-up, timing, and any due dates live in the Assignments/LMS space.

What you’ll do this week

The Week 4 work, in one paragraph:

You will create a Week 4 portfolio subfolder and write a short enriched technical document in Quarto that builds on your Week 3 structured writing and adds one captioned figure (an included image), one small captioned table, and one citation drawn from a references.bib file, using automatic cross-references to point at the figure and table. You will render it to PDF and inspect the apparatus — figure, table, cross-references, and References section. The Adding a Figure, Table, and Citation in Quarto walkthrough takes you through it step by step. The exact assignment prompt, submission details, and checkpoint sign-up live in the Assignments/LMS space.