Creating diagrams for insertion in Lyx or Latex

If you're using Latex to create presentations, you may find yourself wanting to create a diagram on a page, which would be easy in Powerpoint or the OpenOffice presentation program. To do this in Latex, you can create such a diagram in Powerpoint or OpenOffice and export to pdf and then insert that in your Latex file as a figure.

Here are the steps in OpenOffice:

1. create the diagram
2. use the font, 'standard symbols L' to get greek letters
3. print to a file, saving as a ps file (exporting to ps doesn't give good resolution and printing to pdf seems to not produce a legit file in the version of OpenOffice I have been using)
4. ps2pdf to convert to pdf
5. insert in your Latex file as any standard pdf

Keywords: Latex, Lyx, diagrams, OpenOffice, powerpoint

Last modified: 4/2/06.