Customize Cross Reference Items in LaTeX

When we want to include some figures or equations that we want to cross-reference later, we write our LaTeX like below:

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6 \begin{figure}
    \centering        
    \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/cat.png}
    \caption[Cat]{A long name of the cat and description of the figure.}
    \label{fig:cat}
\end{figure}

When we reference it, we write:

1 \ref{fig:cat}

To get:

Figure 1: Cat

This works for most of the times. When what if we want to define another category of items, with independent counter and a name different from “Figure”?

In this case, we have to define our own environment. For example, we have a series of compounds, and we want to make a list of them so we can reference them later. We define a new environment called compound.

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4 \floatstyle{plain}
\newfloat{compound}{thp}{cpd}
\floatname{compound}{Compound}
\renewcommand*{\thecompound}{\textbf{\arabic{compound}}}