I would like to use the slide show feature in the My Pictures folder to create a slide show incorporating photographs (JPEG format), text documents (Microsoft Word) format, and drawings (PDF format). However, only JPEG files appear in the slide show. Is there a way to also include the other file formats? Alternatively, I have tried printing and scanning the Word and PDF documents to JPEG images, but the text and linework is very fuzzy. Can I scan these for clear and sharp text and linework? The computer is running Windows XP.

The Windows XP slide show feature can only include pictures, since the feature was really just designed to display graphic file formats (as this is a feature of the My Pictures folder). As you have already tried, an option is to convert the text-based documents into a graphics format. However, the downside is there can be a significant quality loss when printing and scanning the documents, and this is also likely to make them quite fuzzy, which is due to all the extraneous artefacts which are captured during the scanning process. However, you can get software to convert Word and PDF documents into JPEG and other graphic file formats. Searching the internet for ‘convert word to jpeg’ and ‘convert pdf to jpeg’ yielded many results, so you will need to be careful which software you choose since the different available software packages are likely to be of varying quality.

One example of this type of software is Universal Document Converter (print-driver.com). This software seems to fulfil all the functions you need, and is able to convert Word and PDF documents to JPEG images, with very high quality output. Even better, there is a free trial allowing you to test all functions of the software. The trial version is fully functional, with the only limitation being a large watermark which is placed on each outputted document. However, this still provides you with a good method to properly evaluate the software, and you could even place the test output files into the slide show to test whether they will display clearly enough. I downloaded and installed the trial version and converted a few different Word and PDF documents, and all seemed to work as advertised. So, this may be a suitable software package for your needs. This software is not free (US$69 for a single user licence) but could save you lots of time. That said, there are many other similar software packages available you may wish to try before committing to purchase. Before buying any software make sure you can try-out a trial version of the software to ensure that the software meets your needs.