I would appreciate some suggestions for stitching together scanned sections of large format diagrams (schematics); photo editors such as Photoshop or the GIMP require a lot of resources, are often sluggish (if you don't have very fast hardware) and require a lot of tedious manipulation to achieve the result. There are photographic panorama stitching tools but these too may have problems with a large number of high-resolution scan sections on slower hardware. Microsoft Photo Editor 3.0 had features that made the task quite simple, but it is difficult to install as a stand-alone app without a version of Office.
What are folks using for a simple solution to this task (other than purchasing an expensive large-format scanner)?
Michael