Question: What is the quickest and best way to export a plot image from Mathematica to a $\LaTeX$ Editor? Is there something quicker than exporting it to an image and then including it in the $\LaTeX$ document?

Answer: 
If you create a notebook with some plots and then save it as LaTeX, not only will the images all be generated but so will LaTeX code that you can use to include those images.
The way I do this is by creating a directory structure like the following:

```none
project
project/figures

```

The LaTeX file is in `project`, the figures are in `figures`. I put the notebook(s) used to generate the figures in `project` as well, but you can make a separate directory for them.

The notebooks start with

```
SetDirectory@FileNameJoin[{NotebookDirectory[], "figures"}]

```

and ends with 

```
ResetDirectory[]

```

The figures are then `Export`ed to PDF files. Some tips on how to do this effectively are in this thread:

* [$\LaTeX$ and Mathematica](https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/736/latex-and-mathematica)

The key point is that I export all figures to the correct final size, ensuring that the font sizes will be consistent (e.g. in all figures the fonts will be precisely 8 pt big). (Re-)evaluating the notebook will produce all figures and save them directly into the figure directory.

For the LaTeX part, I use the `graphicx` package and compile everything with `pdflatex`. (`pdflatex` directly supports PDF, PNG and JPEG images.) In the preamble I include `\graphicspath{{./figures/}}`, so I can avoid specifying the full figure path. I include the figures using `\includegraphics{figname}`, *without* writing the file extension. This way, if later it turns out that everything needs to be converted to EPS from PDF (`figname.pdf` --> `figname.eps`), I won't need to modify the LaTeX source, I can simply switch from compiling with `pdflatex` to compiling with `latex`.

If some figures need to be post-processed manually using some illustration software, I export them to a separate directory, then copy the final result manually. I keep all figures under version control (in addition to the figure notebook), in case re-evaluating the figure code will overwrite and break something.