Hello,
I just discovered Quarto by accident and think it can be a perfect tool for academic writing, reporting and publishing. Thanks for the great idea!

The support for subfigures and cross-references seems better comparing to R Markdown. While playing with it, I notice several aspects could potentially be made more friendly to the users.

1. **Merge sub-captions to main caption**

Currently the sub-captions are shown below each sub-figures as `(a) sub-caption1` and `(b) sub-caption2`. It will be nice if the sub-captions can be included into the main caption like: `Figure 1. (a) sub-caption1 and (2) sub-caption2`, but keep the sub-figure indicators `(a)` and `(b)` in the figure. It seems that this is actually the default setup of the [pandoc-crossref](https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref/) but modified in Quarto. It will be nice if the user can switch to different modes easily.
![sep-sub-caption](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129424850-6c8c8ea1-e87a-4172-855a-5c755c6ca23c.png)
![merged-subcap](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129424886-9b887211-bd53-41f1-94e1-7aea47e45181.png)



2. **Automatically adjust sub-figures to fit to designated width (e.g., textwidth)**

This is a dream feature to me. I used to use latex to include sub-figures in articles or beamer slides. It was a pain to adjust the sub-figures (with different original aspect ratios and sizes) to fit one page or slide. I had to manually adjust the percents for each sub-figure until the final result looks good. I could play with the numbers in the custom layout feature in Quarto, but it is still cumbersome. The following two figures compares results using the default `layout-ncol=2` option and the custom layout.
![2col1](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129424463-3fa00df7-b1d0-4a4d-8e2e-4da3e95e77fd.png)
![2col2](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129424469-6cba9a8f-b2bb-46cd-a08a-7eb2f3f5eca2.png)
 
It will save a lot of time if the adjustments can be automatically done by Quarto. For example, by setting a total width and the height of the entire figure, no manual adjustments is required to fit the entire figure to the designated width (normally it is the textwidth, but can be other widths if figure wrapping is needed).

3. **Location of captions for sub-tables**

In my field (engineering), normally the captions for tables are included above the table. This is the case for single tables from Quarto. But when I include sub-tables, the sub-captions and the main captions were treated like figures and were included below the tables. Is this designed by purpose or a glitch?
![sub-tables](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129424492-c235cf59-c506-4373-ac2e-fe4d54a503de.png)


4. **Output to docx**

Just spotted another issue when rendering the file to a docx file. The subfigures were considered as tables and the sub-figures were numbered as individual figures.
![word output](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60116296/129427011-a8e51a57-3d44-435d-acc1-e257336be749.png)



2021-08-13T22:48:55Z
juliantao
Future
open
Captions related to subfigures and sub-tables & Automatic adjustment of subfigure sizes to fit designated width
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues/90