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.
