Earlier this year, I became aware of a feature in GitHub-flavored Markdown that displays a colored square inline when HTML color codes are surrounded by backticks, e.g., #1f77b4
. Although I only recently became aware of this feature, it dates back to at least 2017 and is similar to a feature that Slack has had since at least 2014. When I saw this inline color presentation, I immediately thought of its applicability to figure captions, particularly in academic papers; as a colorblind individual, matching colors referenced in figure captions to features in the figures themselves can be challenging at times due to difficulties with naming colors. Thus, I added similar annotations to figure captions in my recently submitted paper, Two-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: A First Detection of Atmospheric Circular Polarization at Q Band:
Fig. 2. Frequency dependence of polarized atmospheric signal at zenith for the CLASS observing site, both for circular polarization (, shown in blue) and linear polarization (, shown in orange). The light gray bands indicate CLASS observing frequencies, with the lowest frequency band corresponding to the Q-band telescope.
Fig. 5. Example binned azimuth profiles are shown…angle cut. The profile in blue is from a zenith angle of 43.9° and a boresight rotation angle of −45°, the profile in orange is from a zenith angle of 46.7° and a boresight rotation angle of 0°, and the profile in red is from a zenith angle of 52.8° and a boresight rotation angle of +45°.
The first caption refers to a line plot, while the second caption refers to a scatter plot with best fit lines. These examples, as well as underlining examples elsewhere in this post, display best in a browser that supports changing the underline thickness via the text-decoration-thickness
CSS property. At the time of writing, this includes Firefox 70+ and Safari 12.2+ but does not include any version of Chrome; however, browser underlining support is still subpar to the underline rendered by , so the reader is encouraged to view the figures in the paper. Continue reading →