Hello, some journals require each figure to be submitted in a separate document. However, they do want the figure legends to be listed in the main document.

I was thus hoping to do something along these lines:

\section{Figure Legends}
\begin{description} 
 \item[Figure \ref{fig:fireAntBiology}] \label{fig:fireAntBiology} bla bla ants
\end{description}

This would still permit to \ref the figure from the main text. However, it doesn't work (The \ref returns the number of section "Figure Legends"). The following correctly gives a different number to each "figure":

\item[Figure \ref{fig:fireAntBiology}] \begin{figure} \caption{\label{fig:fireAntBiology}} \end{figure} bla bla ants

However, it also places empty figure floats throughout the document.

A solution should be straightforward. What am I missing? Any ideas?

Thanks! yannick