When creating diagrams for inclusion in a Beamer presentation, I used to use the drawing package in Open Office. Then I could use PSfrag to replace drawing text with text rendered in in \LaTeX. This made all the symbols in the presentation match symbols on the diagram. Alas, I am no longer able to make Open Office work with PSfrag. (My old trick of modifying the EPS “textmode” value in the OO configuration file no longer works.)
No problem, I thought. I’ll use Adobe Illustrator instead. However, I could only get this arrangement to work if the drawing text consisted of single letters. Not a huge problem, I suppose, as there are 52 possible identifiers just using upper and lower case letters in the English alphabet. However, it is sometimes a bit difficult to remember if x_3 is being represented by “p,” or “q,” or some other letter.
So here’s a solution to the problem, that I found on Giovanni Lanzani’s blog. When saving the EPS file in Illustrator, select “Illustrator 3 EPS” in the “version” pulldown. Don’t use “Illustrator CS3 EPS.” The newer versions write out the text one letter at a time, thus preventing the PSfrag routine from finding a matching string. Apparently the older EPS export routine doesn’t mangle the drawing text in this manner.