Found a common bug in LateX that is so persistent that even the Fedora 9 /CentOS5.2 shipped latex still has this problem. I have not checked if Fedora 10 fixes this already.

Simply put it, to get a correct figure number,
type \caption first and then followed by \label. (in other words,
Label should come Last).

The figure number is wrong if you put \label before \caption.

LateX claims to be a high quality scientific software that I don't
it should fail on such trivial thing.

I noticed the problem but was not able to solve it.
Only

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com...igure-numbers/

tells me what to do. But I guess since linux distros ship LateX, can someone
out there please fix this once and for all. Don't make science harder than it already is.

Doesn't seem to be a big problem to me, just part of the syntax. When I did a google search for

latex figure caption label

This was the first hit

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/F...ss-referencing

Should everyone go through this ordeal? It is just a mistake too easy to make, especially if you got it right on day one since you follow the syntax religiously. On day two, when you are busy typing your notes, concentrating on all other non-LaTeX issues (content, deadline, etc), and you manage to remember the keywords of label and caption, and then you have 50% of screwing up something easily. It is not a big deal after all, once you know that it is a rather stupid and simple rule to follow. If this caption-label rule is imposed by the intrinsic LaTeX rules, then I see there is no way out but to conclude that this is a "feature" of LaTeX. But if it can be fixed by the LaTeX developers, then do it to save millions of google searches.

This is sick. Telling that "it's just a syntax" is not normal, come on. I trusted Latex for many years but this ENORMOUS BUG leaded me to really big problems. Sincerely, I expected Latex to be the best editing system over these years, now I'm thinking after I discovered this ENORMOUS BUG - unfortunately I can't fix my PDF file now - that maybe I should change back my habits to M$ Word... Really this it is silly to reduce this huge error to syntax errors!! No, this is not a SYNTAX ERROR in my tex files: THIS IS JUST A HUGE ERROR IN LATEX!!

If you think this is a bug, you can submit a bug report here:

http://www.latex-project.org/bugs-upload.html