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: 
One way to speed up the workflow is to batch process all your images and even formulas if you have many. Basically do all your work in the *Mathematica* notebook placing distinct graphics, formulas and text in separate cells. Then choose **File > Save As...** and pick **LaTeX Document (\*.tex)** from the drop down menu of popped up window. This will produce a set of .EPS files for each of your graphics stored in separate cells and a coherent .TEX file with text, formulas and calls to the .EPS 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.