Dear xfig user:

Imagine this:  you have drawn up a great xfig picture with some text in
it, and you want LaTeX to render the text, for instance, a few vertices
labeled "$v_1$" and "$v_2$.  What do you do?

Here is the deal.  Use the edit button in xfig and select the text box you
want rendered.  In the Edit panel that pops up, you must do two things:
first click on the "Font" box at the bottom and select a LaTeX font, and
second click on the Special Flag box and select "Special" instead of
"Normal".  (Note: things will also work if you set both of these options {\em
before} writing any text in your xfig picture.  Use the buttons on the
bottom of the screen after clicking the text tool.)

After saving your diagram as a .fig file, you must now export the figure
into a file format that LaTeX understands.  Select Export from the File
menu, and in the Export Menu window that pops up, you should choose the
language (upper middle of the window) to be "Combined PS/LaTeX (both
parts)".  Also, you should probably scale the figure (at the top of the
window) so that its dimensions fit nicely on the page.  Pressing the Export
button at the bottom of the window should create two files, a .pstex_t
file and a .pstex file.  (note that these two files need to be in the same
directory as the .tex file for your paper).

In the preamble of your paper, you need to have the following lines:

\usepackage{epsfig}
\usepackage{color}

Note that you can replace the line ``\usepackage{color}'' with

\newcommand{\color[2]}{}

(this is in case you do not have the color package, but I do not really
know if this will ever be a problem).

Now, in your paper, you can include the diagram with the following lines
of TeX code:

\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\input{your_figure_name.pstex_t}
\caption{Write a caption for your figure here.}
\label{label_for_your_figure}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

Note that you \input the .pstex_t file, NOT the .pstex file.  One note about
the figures in LaTeX is that they ``float''; that is, LaTeX may not put the
figure between the lines of text that appear in the source file (it may be
aesthetically better for the figure to be at the top of the following
page, for example), and for this reason it is important to refer your figure
by label.  (i.e. See Figure \ref{label_for_your_figure} is a
great parenthetical to make use of.)  I believe that refering to a figure by
label encourages LaTeX to put the figure close by.

Alright!  I think that this is about it.  Feel free to ask questions if
you run into problems, and also be aware that there is tons of
LaTeX documentation on the web.

Happy TeXing,

Phil