> Ok, your proposal has the disadvantage that the error occurs only when > referring to the label (and at the point of reference instead of > definition). so does yours i think, or how was your proposal meant? > And it has the advantage that if you are only out for a > \pageref in the first place, this will still be legal. well, compare it to the outcome of your proposal which looks like this: ! Undefined control sequence. \@currentlabel ...ing \label inside of a figure. l.22 \label{foo} i guess it is fairly difficult to find a short enough csname that in the above output will look reasonable and b) it will still probably open more questions than answering them > > any suggestion for a good text? > > \label{whatever} without preceding or enclosing \caption. > Labels must follow the item they are referencing. well "whatever" is not known when we generate that text, is it? frank