Referencing figures with numbers in Sphinx and reStructuredText

Question

When writing RST that will be processed with Sphinx, I can\'t get Sphinx LaTeX output to use figure numbers when referencing figures. For instance, this code:

Answer 1

To expand on the accepted answer, you can quickly get this set up as follows. Put the numfig.py file in your source directory. Then open conf.py and uncomment the line that says

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('.'))

Then add 'numfig' to the extensions list.

To use in your rst document, first label your figure (e.g., fig-main):

.. _fig-main:

.. figure:: main.png

   This is the figure caption.

Finally, you can reference its figure number using the :num: directive, like this:

Refer to the main figure (Figure :num:`fig-main`).