@DavidCarlisle Well, at the time, as I began formulating the question, I started writing from a novice's point of view, without even realising it! Actually, that supports the erroneous MWE provided along with it rather well, in my opinion. But, you are right! Compared to my answer below, it does look a bit odd. I will go through it again and try to level it out. You also say that the answer itself is quite strange. Perhaps because it takes a longer route to the solution than necessary.

@DavidCarlisle May be it is strange for most people, who'd just like to hide the \caption{} from main figure and add individual \caption{}commands below 3 \includegraphics{} commands. However, just to reiterate, in my experience I've fond that some times we have to go back and change the appearance of such \includegraphics setups. e.g.: If the reader/ assessor isn't happy and wants a proper figure with main caption as well and also wants to add a 4th image with 2 images side-by-side.

@DavidCarlisle In such a case, keeping the original figure-subfigure setup with muted main \caption{} serves as an advantage. As long as I have the necessary \captionsetup{} and associated commands defined, I simply have to change the required \captionsetup{} variables to un-mute the main caption and change the appearance of sub-figure captions with another variable.

@DavidCarlisle Also, remove the empty line between two consecutive sub-figures and add it instead after these two subfigures to get the side-by-side 2 up 2 below appearance. If I didn't have the entire setup already, I will have to spend some extra time adding all the missing bits, before I can achieve the same result. So, in a way, the setup I present in that answer helps you to quickly change appearances, if needed, without spending extra time.

@DavidCarlisle How is that strange? It appears normal to me, perhaps because, I have gone back and done similar changes to my figures a zillion times at the request of my thesis guide! :) Hope that explains it. If you feel the answer would benefit from such explanation, do let me know and I will modify it as appropriate. Thank you for your reply! :)

@Johannes_B Damn! I knew that! Got too excited I guess! :| .. Will change it soon. And thanks for your's and @DavidCarlisle 's feedback, it helps a lot! :)

Holy text, Batman.

@Amar I meant it is strange to word a self answer as if it is from someone else. (I don't understand why you would want such complicated markup rather than just using \caption four times, but that's a different issue)

Too quiet in here.

@DavidCarlisle oopsie

England
350 all out
62 - for 2 wickets (27.1 overs)

New Zealand
350 all out
454 - for 8 wickets dec

England need to score 393 more runs.

@PauloCereda ^^

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle National holiday for Italy. :P

@egreg yay republic!

@PauloCereda touch of death, I have: by the time you read that it was 62 for 3 :(

@DavidCarlisle Oh no!

@DavidCarlisle Now you just need an average of 57 runs per wicket. Easy. :)

@egreg what we need is more rain.

@egreg if we achieve that it would be the highest last innings total in the history of test cricket:-)

I wonder how you test cricket...

l3build cricket

@DavidCarlisle Records are made to be broken. You don't have faith.

@egreg Did you see a screenshot I posted yesterday? David made me install Windows XP so I could debug an obscure bug in arara. At least he doesn't have an excuse to not use it anymore. :)

@egreg I have faith in the power of praying for rain

Internet has everything. :)

another wicket gone: 73 for 4

@DavidCarlisle You should play Chris Isaak's Wicked Wicket game. It's almost the same. :)

@DavidCarlisle Here's my version for the Laplace transform question

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\begin{document}


The above equations on application of Laplace Transform become
\begin{align*}
sL_1\hat{i}_{L1}(s) &=
  \!\begin{aligned}[t]
    &D\cdot \hat{v}_{C1}(s) + D\cdot \hat{v}_{C2}(s) - D' \cdot \hat{v}_g(s) \\
    &\qquad + (C_{C1} + V_{C2} - V_g + V_D)\cdot \hat{d}(s)
  \end{aligned}
\\[1\jot]
sL_2\hat{i}_{L2}(s) &=
  \!\begin{aligned}[t]
    &{-}D' \cdot \hat{v}_{C1}(s) + D\cdot \hat{v}+{C2}(s) + D' \cdot \hat{v}_g(s) \\
    &\qquad + (C_{C1} + V_{C2} - V_g + V_D)\cdot \hat{d}(s)

@egreg yes... I started to do a version that pushed the broken lines further to the right, but decided to keep it simple, people have to start somewhere.

@egreg what happened to the tick here? tex.stackexchange.com/q/248064/1090

@DavidCarlisle It went to the right answer.

@egreg oh

@egreg Happy Festa della Repubblica!

And happy birthday to me :-)

@ArthurReutenauer happy birthday:-)

@DavidCarlisle Thanks

We’re having cake

@ArthurReutenauer Happy birthday! I can send my sister's Apfel Strudel

@egreg Yummy ... Thanks! :-)

@ArthurReutenauer Happy birthday!

@PauloCereda Thank you!

@ArthurReutenauer Cakeeeeeeeee

@PauloCereda Sorry I can’t send some over to São Paulo ;-)

@ArthurReutenauer Oh no! :)

@egreg -- why is the hat over a dotted i rather than an undotted one?

@ArthurReutenauer -- another happy birthday -- enjoy!

England 162-7

@egreg -- i was once told that the criterion by which to judge apfel strudel was, can one read the newspaper through one layer of the strudel pastry? similarly for baklava. (that does look good!)

@DavidCarlisle Oh good grief

@barbarabeeton That's surely a good criterion!

@barbarabeeton And it's satisfied with my mom's and my sister's strudel.

@egreg That's yet another good reason for me to visit you. :)

@barbarabeeton We might go for a Konditorei tour in Darmstadt.

@egreg -- you have just checked, of course? (by actual inspection with a newspaper, or by some other means?) and of course, you ate the evidence!

@barbarabeeton Unfortunately I can't show that evidence in trial.

@egreg -- that certainly sounds like fun! i'm sure my husband will sign on right away!

NZ beat England by 199 runs

@DavidCarlisle No world record, then. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle And consider that the Newzealanders must play upside down!

@egreg that wasn't really a possibility but once again faith in being saved by the weather failed.

@DavidCarlisle Where's the good old rainy English weather?

@egreg not sure, there's a big yellow thing in the sky, I have no idea what it is.

@DavidCarlisle You’re lucky, it’s taken its sweet time but it seems it has come out in the end.

@ArthurReutenauer "It" would be the mythical English sun, I assume?

@FaheemMitha Some Britons claim to have seen it once in their life.

@egreg I used to live there. It used to make rare appearances.

Hi @egreg. How was the voting?

@FaheemMitha All went good and smooth; low turnout (65%), less than I expected. So we had to count 416 ballots, which was rather fast. At 2:30am I was at home after fetching the packs to the offices: just for simplifying things, they made us go to two different places, far away from each other.

@egreg I see. I don't understand the reference to "simplifying things".

@FaheemMitha Bureaucrats are fond of finding how to complicate other people's life.

@egreg I've noticed.

@FaheemMitha Anyway, I was the fifth to finish up in town. :)

@egreg Congratulations. Which town is that, again?

@FaheemMitha Padova. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padua

@egreg Ah, the historic town of Padua.

I seem to recall a Shakespearean connection.

Ah, yes. The Taming of The Shrew.

@FaheemMitha Yes, that's right!

@egreg Sounds like a nice place to live.

@FaheemMitha It is.

@egreg: No Blatter. :)

@egreg You work at the University of Verona? Wow, it must be like living inside a Shakespeare play. :-)

@FaheemMitha :) I'm one of the two gentlemen, of course.

@egreg Of course.

@FaheemMitha When talking about foundational questions related to meaning of names, I always quote “What's in a name? That which we call a rose // By any other name would smell as sweet.”

@egreg Actually, living where you do, I would have thought you would get sick of people mentioning Shakespeare. After all, he wasn't even Italian.

@barbarabeeton that's quite the stretch. Was Anne Hathaway supposed to be Italian too?

@FaheemMitha -- that was never mentioned.

@barbarabeeton Ah.

@barbarabeeton There are people who claim it; some say he was from Sicily.

@egreg -- so his given name was really guillaume?

@egreg that would account for his poor English spelling:-)

@barbarabeeton Or Guglielmo Crollalanza

@barbarabeeton "crolla=shake”, “lanza=spear”

@egreg -- oops! that was french, not italian. (i should know better. marconi's first name was guglielmo. the "marconi station", where the first transatlantic radio towers were installed, is on cape cod, and we've visited it many times. a beautiful location, but sadly, being eroded, and falling into the ocean.)

@barbarabeeton :( There's a “Torre Marconi” in the town where I go to the sea in Liguria, from where he did some of his experiments. A very nice place:

It's the small building in the middle of the wood.

Another view of the town

@egreg -- what a very pretty peninsula! the sea there looks much quieter than the atlantic ocean, at least on the u.s. east coast. (hurricane season has just begun; it's predicted to be a relatively quiet one, but that's not something that can be counted on. rhode island has been lucky for quite a few years, but there are still visible scars from some "big ones" if you know where to look.)

@DavidCarlisle Would something like \boxdef be unheard of for elocalloc?

I suppose it's not strictly necessary since \countdef and \box can do the same

@barbarabeeton No hurricanes, but in the summer small tornados can form above the sea and sometimes they arrive to the shore. But generally the summer weather is sunny; in the winter it's pretty mild. Retired people often buy houses in the Tigullio gulf (one end of which is that peninsula, the other end being the mount of Portofino) to have not so cold winters.

There can be sea storms in the winter, which can make damages. It happens that the railway must stop during those storms, because it runs very near to the coast.

My cousins who live there were very happy during winter storms, because the town's middle school used to be the big yellow building that can be seen in the first picture: waves could arrive to the building during the most severe storms, so the school was closed.

@1010011010 There has never been a \boxdef command.

Would anyone know how to make a pie chart have a black borders in between the pies? The figure is made with tikzpicture and I couldn't find a way to do this... Asking here as I have a deadline coming like now :D

@egreg Exactly.

@1010011010 \chardef I assume you mean. Why? (it wouldn't fit that package anyway, but it wouldn't seem particularly useful, the defined csname couldn't be a box)

@DavidCarlisle Oh, yeah you're right... anyway, I was thinking something along the lines of \boxdef\mybox=100 which would assign the \mybox macro to scratch box 100. But I suppose there isn't that much use for it...

@1010011010 It's \chardef\mybox=100.

Salutations

@Canageek Ciao!

@Cadbon Sorry, pie charts are unknown to me.

I'm surprised I still don't have an explanation of why my PNGs make my PDF so much larger then the JPEG, even if the JPEG is a larger file.

@Canageek as far as I recall jpeg can be incorporated more or less as-is into pdf but png bitmaps have to be recoded into whatever pdf does with bitmaps

@DavidCarlisle That was my guess, but I wanted to be sure. I know sometimes pdfimages -j will give me a JPEG, whereas everything else comes out as a .ppm, but I wasn't sure if that was how it extracted them.

@DavidCarlisle: Do you know what these are?

I see you're kinda low on that kind of activity...

@Werner shrug, I could have downvoted less, I suppose.

...seeing, of course, that others are contributing to your "pile"...

@DavidCarlisle Yes, for sure. I'm going to hold that against you.

@PaulGessler: Looks OK? :D

@Werner I think on balance I contribute to the site, people contribute in different ways.

@DavidCarlisle That is true. SE is built on contributions through posts and votes.

@ChristianHupfer well, there was nothing else to be done... it's an answer, albeit a wrong one. And any comments I would have made were already made by others, so I upvoted them. What would you have me do?

@PaulGessler: I just wondered :D

@DavidCarlisle: If contributions were from posts only, this would become very much forum-like. That is, irrelevant answers may be similar to comments, and become part of the mix of "stuff" related to the question, or not.

@ChristianHupfer Deleted

@Werner whatever, I don't see it matters that the votes and the posts come from the same people. Do you hassle people who vote a lot to answer more questions?

@egreg Yes, your funny comment is deleted as well ;-)

@DavidCarlisle Nope, and like anything here there's no way to force people to do certain things.

I saw something, commented on it, and received a response, that's all.

Don't take it personally...

@Werner I don't:-) (but thought your comment deserved an answer:-)

@DavidCarlisle I saw what you did there... :)

@ChristianHupfer I'll survive it. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle I do wonder why certain people vote on certain questions though... and since voting is anonymous, it's far more difficult to ask them the questions.

@egreg :D

Good night all!

@egreg Buonanotte!

@egreg: Good night

@egreg Buona notte