Friday 25 June 2010

Hyperref and Cleveref LaTeX Conflict

I ran into a conflict between two LaTeX packages when writing my thesis. Both the hyperref and cleveref are useful packages for automatically dealing with references in a document.

Hyperref is a TeX package for making documents with live links in PDF and HTML output formats. This places automatic links for \ref{} and \cite{} commands into the final PDF document. This allows readers to simply click on a reference to a Table, Figure, Equation or Citation and be taken to its location in the document.

The cleveref package enhances LaTeX's cross-referencing features, allowing the format of references to be determined automatically according to the type of reference. This is almost like type inference found in modern programming languages. When using the \ref{} command in LaTeX, one typically mentions the type of reference in the text and then \ref{} provides the number for the reference. For example, Table \ref{table:x2} shows the values of x^2 for integers 1 through 10. Using cleveref one can omit the leading Table and the package automatically infers it from the reference. For example, \Cref{table:x2} shows the values of x^2 for integers 1 through 10.

I used cleveref throughout my entire thesis and I included the hyperref package at the end to add PDF links. Unfortunately this somehow manages to conflict with cleveref and it no longer works as expected. The following demonstrates what happens. The caption of the Figure is inserted into the reference.

cleveref and hyperref conflicting

I ended up not using the cleveref package for this reason. I am not a LaTeX expert when it comes writing packages, so until I can dedicate some time to learn what is going on I have no working solution.

I used the TeXLive packages from the Ubuntu repository which contains the hyperref package. I downloaded cleveref from the CTAN repository.