@joseph On your other question: Yes, at the moment the pullquote environment constructs a rectangular unbreakable object containing two text columns and the inserted object. From a usage point of view this is all very simplistic. But a seamless integration into the LaTeX engine would be extremely hard, and so far the questions asking for pull quotes never contained any realistic use cases ;-)

@Stephan, the code you provided for the captions works fine. I'd forgotten to include the width of the minipage.

As to usability, I guess it can be made to work as a separate page in a two-column document, since the object is in fact unbreakable. I guess one could set the whole document inside the environment, too. If one wants just one page with pullquotes, then, something like \clearpage would be needed.

From a structural point of view (or a typographical one, if I may), pullquotes look nice as catchphrases in glossy magazines, which imply the editor/typesetter has chosen to stress what s/he thinks is important, rather than let the reader sort that out. So, there are other things that look nicer for emphasis, and can be used by authors themselves: pullquotes, from that point of view, stand between summary, abstract, and old-style headers with long textual descriptive sentences.

@Joseph Sure, but for really typesetting documents with pull quotes, one would need the usual kind of text flow, where the pullquotes are positioned like floating objects. My own typesetting engine DocScape can do this, but it has a completely different page model than LaTeX, where this would be very very hard.