Pamendian User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pamendian User Manual(1)
NAME
pamendian - reverse endianness of a Netpbm image
SYNOPSIS
pamendian
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
All Netpbm formats that have samples in pure binary format with multiple
bytes are defined to have them in big endian (most significant byte
first) order. However, there exist variations on these formats, primar-
ily developed before official multibyte Netpbm formats existed, that are
identical to Netpbm formats in every respect except that samples are in
little endian (least significant byte first) order.
pamendian reverses the byte order of the sample to convert between the
two formats. If the input is true PAM, PGM, or PPM, the output is the
little endian variation on that format, and vice versa.
The X Window System viewer xv expects the little endian variation of PGM
and PPM.
Programs that come with the Independent Jpeg Group's JPEG library are
known to use the little endian variation of PGM and PPM.
The reason some programs use this variant is that at one time during
Netpbm's dark age(1), there was a version of Netpbm around that used it.
But it was never formally specified.
This program takes input only on Standard Input. Its output is always
on Standard Output.
You should never have to use this program with images generated by pro-
grams in the Netpbm package or programs that use the Netpbm libraries.
If you do, that probably means something needs to be fixed in those pro-
grams. The Netpbm converter for any graphics format that represents
numbers in little endian form should properly reverse the bytes to cre-
ate correct Netpbm output.
If you create a Netpbm image from a generic stream of samples, using
rawtopgm or rawtoppm, use options on those programs to declare the endi-
anness of your input, thus creating correct endianness in your PGM or
PPM output.
OPTIONS
There are no command line options defined specifically for pamendian,
but it recognizes the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(See ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ .)
SEE ALSO
pamdepth(1), rawtopgm(1), rawtoppm(1), pnm(1)
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/pamendian.html
netpbm documentation 16 March 2002 Pamendian User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:51:09 CET 2025.