Anytopnm User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Anytopnm User Manual(1)
NAME
anytopnm - convert an arbitrary type of image file to PBM, PGM, or PPM
SYNOPSIS
anytopnm [file]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
anytopnm converts the input image, which may be in any of about 100
graphics formats, to PBM, PGM, or PPM format, depending on that nature
of the input image, and outputs it to Standard Output.
To determine the format of the input, anytopnm uses the file program
(possibly assisted by the magic numbers file fragment included with
Netpbm). If that fails (very few image formats have magic numbers), any-
topnm looks at the filename extension. If that fails, anytopnm punts.
The type of the output file depends on the input image.
anytopnm uses the converters for particular graphics formats that are in
the Netpbm package, so it can't convert any format that you couldn't
convert with some other Netpbm program. What anytopnm adds is the abil-
ity to recognize the format and choose the appropriate Netpbm program to
convert it. For example, if you invoke anytopnm on a GIF file, anytopnm
will recognize that it is a GIF file and therefore giftopnm knows how to
convert it to PNM, so anytopnm invokes giftopnm.
anytopnm cannot recognize every possible input format, so you may still
be able to convert an image with a specific Netpbm program when anytopnm
fails to convert it.
If file indicates that the input file is compressed (either via Unix
compress, gzip, or bzip compression), anytopnm uncompresses it and pro-
ceeds as above with the uncompressed result.
If file indicates that the input file is encoded by uuencode or btoa,
anytopnm decodes it and proceeds as above with the decoded result.
If file is - or not given, anytopnm takes its input from Standard Input.
Many image formats are capable of representing multiple images. In most
cases, anytopnm converts these to multi-image Netpbm images, but for
some formats, anytopnm converts only the first image and ignores the
rest.
In the case of a multi-image GIF input, anytopnm converts all the images
starting with Netpbm 10.69 (December 2014), but only the first in ear-
lier releases.
OPTIONS
There are no command line options defined specifically for anytopnm.
anytopnm does not recognize the options common to all programs based on
libnetpbm (See ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ .) However, the -version option works.
SEE ALSO
pamfile(1), pnm(1), file man page
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
source. The master documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/anytopnm.html
netpbm documentation 15 November 2014 Anytopnm User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:34:51 CET 2025.