When writing papers you want your graphics to be in vector format to maintain a high quality of the images. Unfortunately there are not too many good tools within a resonable budget to create vector graphics on Windows so this is how I do it…

It is a bit roundabout, but here goes…

Download and install PDFCreator.

Download Briss: Briss. Place it wherever. Briss is used for cropping PDF’s if you don’t need to crop, you don’t need Briss.

Both are excellent free tools.

Create your graphics in Microsoft Powerpoint, which is actually pretty good a that as these things goes.
Print your slide using PDFCreator as your printer. PDFCreator is polite enough to embedd the fonts in the PDF, this is a good thing.

Update: Microsoft Powerpoint 2011 (and above I assume) now has “Save as..” PDF, this may also work, in this case PDFCreator is not nessecary any more.

Often I need to crop away white edges. Start Briss and load the file, mark the region you want to keep and Crop.

Now the pdf is ready to be imported in Latex for your authoring pleasure!