Aloha all,

First, apologies for my rudimentary programming skills.  The attached  
patch partially answers the query I posed earlier: the shortn argument  
was ignored except for the wrapfigure environment.  The attached patch  
makes other environments aware of shortn.

This works, sort of.  If all the #+CAPTION: lines are of this form # 
+CAPTION: [shortn]{caption}, then all goes well.  If one caption of  
this form is followed by others of this form #+CAPTION: caption, then  
the list of figures contains repeated entries of shortn.  I suspect  
there is code somewhere that clears a variable.  I can try to look for  
it, but I have to tell you that the lisp code to org-mode looks like  
magic spells to my untrained eye.

All the best,
Tom