Combining multiple jpegs into 1

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Jerry Feldman asked:
> What is the best way to combine several jpegs into a single image.

What I usually do for simplicity's sake is just bring up the images on-screen
using whatever tools are most convenient, and then use a screen-capture
utility to make the composite jpeg file.  I've done enough desktop-support
that this is really the only reasonable recommendation I've found for helping
people at all levels of technical ability to make photo compositions.

The only caveats are that you really want your display to be in 24- or 32-bit
color mode, you want to display the images as large as you can, and the images
thus created will be best suited for monitor display (as opposed to high-res
printing).

Here is a page of capture utility reviews I found in a quick search: 
http://tejasconsulting.com/open-testware/feature/screen-capture-tools-survey.html

The screen capture utility I use at home, because I Windoze XP is my desktop
even though most of the apps are served on a separate Linux box, is
ScreenHunter 4.0.

The PDF converter I use is ReadIris, but it's nowhere near as straightforward
as ScreenHunter.  I like being able to email PDF files to correspondents,
because they have a great WYSIWYG capability for both images and text.  But
I've yet to find the ultimate easy-to-use utility for quickly scanning a file
drawer full of documents and outputting a directory of thousands of PDF page
views.  Last year I made a valiant attempt at scanning a few hundred recipes
but aborted the project after laboriously scanning about 100 via ReadIris.

-rich