I wake up eary Sunday morning to find a laptop outside my bedroom door. This is generally indicative of sermon-stopping technical issues. I go searching for explanatory notes and the all important power brick and find them next to the kettle where I usually find instructions for locating whichever meals I've managed to sleep through.
The problem: mother cannot get pictures into PowerPoint.
On further examination the pictures are kindly wrapped in a PDF. Great. Not wanting to be permanently empolyed as a human PDF to JPG converter, I asked google. Google's answer, any number of shareware, nagware, registerware and part-with-$69-before-you-discover-it's-crapware. Great. Further searhching suggests some online tools that are full of fail, some imagemagick wresting that's garanteed to make my presence required for future operations. apt-cache search pdf isn't helpfule either. I'm 3 cups of coffee into fail.
And then I remember my old friend the GIMP. That's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, not an aquaintance with interesting tastes. The GIMP is all to eager to open the PDF, but Vista takes exception to a window being opened for each page of the PDF. Not wanting to fiddle with importing a few pages at a time, I sit down at my mum's desktop, which runs Ubuntu. No complaints there about opening about 50 GIMP windows. Open Source takes the win twice.
EDIT:It is entirely practical to use the GIMP under Windows as described, but if you're doing a lot of pages, use the import range option to process about 10 at a time or you might run into a few problems.
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You see, my first choice
You see, my first choice would be to teach my mum about prt sc and paint.
Last time I checked one could
Last time I checked one could paste an image directly from the clipboard into Powerpoint, the crop tool in Powerpoint is probably easier to use too, but that's not the issue.
Why not use Print Screen? Well it works if what your source image is being displayed at screen resolution and you don't intend to reside the image in any way. This sometimes works for web publishing, the rest of the time it causes massive headaches. What looks OK on a laptop screen may well look terrible once it's blown up huge, and it's the person giving the technical advice that gets the blame.
When you have photos at 300dpi or better, it's suicide to reduce them to the 100ish dpi your screen runs on by using Print Screen. This is what causes presentations to look bad, printouts to look worse, and anyone asked to print out a few thousand copies and make them look nice to go bald prematurely.
Given that I've been asked about Print Screen here, and on LJ and Facebook that both eat my blog for breakfast, I guess I should assume that it's a common mistake or that someone is trolling me. Either way my strategy is to try to assist people in producing high quality work. Very few things have a cringe factor bigger than badly prepared images.
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