astronomy-the-caption-is-the-figure-specification

# When you cannot see the figure, its caption is the build specification The study you are reproducing is often not in your workspace: `related_work/` holds neighbours, and the source itself reaches you as a fetched arXiv or publisher page. That fetch usually loses the rendered panels and never loses the captions — and a caption in this field is not a description, it is a specification. It names how many panels there are and in what order, what quantity each one shows, which curves appear and in what colours, which dataset supplies the points in each panel, what the curves are plotted *relative to*, and what was done to the data before plotting. Every one of those clauses is a line of plotting code that you will otherwise write differently, and every one of them changes what a reader sees when your panel is laid beside the source's. **At literature stage, copy each relevant caption verbatim into notes and split it into build clauses.** One row per clause: panel index and position, y-quantity and its unit, each series with its colour and line style, the reference model, the data normalisation, the abscissa and its range, whether the points carry error bars. Do this for every numbered figure the task or the supplied data points at — a supplied data block labelled "extracted from Figure N" is a pointer to Figure N even when nothing else in the brief mentions it. This complements `draw-the-source-figure-panel-for-panel`, which builds the same row list off the *rendered* figure ...