A few days ago I was looking for a more robust type-aware cross-reference helper macro for LaTeX. This type of macro lets you specify something like:
\autoref{fig:tuna}
Assuming fig:tuna is the fifth figure, this macro will produce "figure 5". This is very convenient if the type of a reference might change. Previously I had used hyperref but it was a bit of a pain to customize and it was not obvious how to get good list output.
I was pointed to cleveref, which is easily customizable and seems to handle just about everything. It provides two macros: cref and crefrange. The first allows you to specify a list of labels and it does the right thing. If you list three or more consecutive labels to entities of the same type, it will collapse them into a range when printed; something like
\cref{fig:1,fig:2,fig:3}
becomes "figures 1 to 3" in the document. You can also mix references to different types of entities in one cref and the sensible thing happens. crefrange takes two arguments and, as the name implies, produces a reference to a range of entities.