Pretty pictures and LaTeX

Abstract:

Using LaTeX to typeset beautiful documents is simple when only the most basic of documents is desired, but can be a real pain in the arse if you ever want to include pictures or diagrams. Several solutions exist for including nicely integrated pictures: xypic, pstricks, psfrag, tikz/PGF etc. but all have their short-comings. Either they're hard to use, don't work with pdfLaTeX or are just outdated. The open source, vector graphics package Inkscape (v0.48) makes drawing good pictures simple, and includes a feature to let LaTeX handle the text and labels. This means your diagram's labels are typeset the same as the text in the rest of your document and can include such LaTeX features such as mathematics and references (using ??????) to other objects in your document.