Asciitopgm User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Asciitopgm User Manual(1)
NAME
asciitopgm - convert ASCII graphics into a PGM
SYNOPSIS
asciitopgm [-d divisor] height width [asciifile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
asciitopgm reads ASCII data as input and produces a PGM image with pixel
values which are an approximation of the "brightness" of the ASCII char-
acters, assuming black-on-white printing. In other words, a capital M
is very dark, a period is very light, and a space is white.
Obviously, asciitopgm assumes a certain font in assigning a brightness
value to a character.
asciitopgm considers ASCII control characters to be all white. For a
lower case character, It assigns a special brightnesses which has noth-
ing to do with what it looks like printed. asciitopgm takes the ASCII
character code from the lower 7 bits of each input byte. But it warns
you if the most significant bit of any input byte is not zero.
The output image is height pixels high by width pixels wide, truncating
and padding with white on the right and bottom as necessary.
The divisor value is an integer (decimal) by which the blackness of an
input character is divided. You can use this to adjust the brightness
of the output: for example, if the image is too bright, increase the di-
visor.
In a sort of reminiscence of Fortran line printer carriage control,
where a line starts with + (plus), asciitopgm combines it with the pre-
vious row of output instead of generating a new row. This allows a
larger range of gray values. (In Fortran carriage control, the first
character of every line sent to the printer tells how much to advance
the paper, with + meaning not at all, so that the rest of the characters
on the line overstrike the ones already on the paper. What asciitopgm
does is rather different in that asciitopgm does not reserve the first
character of every line that way. If the first character is anything
but +, asciitopgm considers it just to be first character of the image.
If you're looking for something that creates an image of text, with that
text specified in ASCII, that is something quite different. Use pbmtext
for that.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), asciitopgm recognizes the
following command line option:
-d divisor
Specify the value by which the blackness of an input character is
divided. This is an integer value. Default value is 1. Larger
values produce darker output images.
SEE ALSO
pbmtoascii(1), pbmtext(1), pgm(1)
AUTHOR
Wilson H. Bent. Jr. (whb@usc.edu)
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/asciitopgm.html
netpbm documentation 20 January 2011 Asciitopgm User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:59:34 CET 2025.