Pamtowinicon User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pamtowinicon User Manual(1)
NAME
pamtowinicon - convert Netpbm PAM images to a Microsoft Windows icon
file
SYNOPSIS
pamtowinicon [-pngthreshold=threshold] [-truetransparent] [-verbose]
[pam_file]
All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. You may
use two hyphens instead of one to designate an option. You may use ei-
ther white space or equals signs between an option name and its value.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pamtowinicon reads an RGB_ALPHA Netpbm PAM file and converts it to a Mi-
crosoft Windows icon file.
The output goes to Standard Output.
The input is a multi-image PAM file; each image becomes an icon in the
output file. If you have input images in multiple files, you can simply
combine them with cat and pass the result to pamtowinicon.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\Common Options]8;;\ ), pamtowinicon recognizes the
following command line options:
-pngthreshold=threshold
pamtowinicon encodes images with resolutions above or equal
threshold by threshold as PNG by running pnmtopng(1). Other im-
ages it encodes using the more traditional BMP format.
When the program uses PNG encoding for a 5-channel PAM with sepa-
rate AND mask (see below), it discards the AND mask. Because PNG
has always had the ability to specify transparency, the Windows
icon format does not provide for a separate and mask when the
icon is encoded in PNG.
The default value for threshold is 128.
-truetransparent
Make all pixels outside the opaque area black, avoiding inversion
and other effects on the background of the image (see Windows
Icons(1)).
-verbose
Print more messages
IMAGES
pamtowinicon reads a (multi-image) Netpbm PAM file as input and outputs
an single Windows icon file containing those images.
The images in the icon file are in the same order as in the PAM input.
PAM Input
pamtowinicon interprets the PAM images as follows, based on the number
of channels.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
channels image
1 fully opaque grayscale image
2 grayscale image with transparency channel
3 fully opaque color image
4 color image with transparency channel
5 color image with transparency channel and additional AND
mask
The tuple types of the PAMs are irrelevant.
AND Mask
The so-called "AND mask" is a special feature of Microsoft Windows
icons. It is required for all BMP encoded images. At the first sight,
the AND mask is a 1-bit transparency channel, but it is also used for
e.g. shading the icon while dragging. See Windows Icons(1) for details.
If there is no explicit AND mask, but transparency data in the input im-
age, pamtowinicon sets the AND mask to opaque where the sample in the
transparency channel is below maxval, and to transparent elsewhere.
If no transparency data is present in the input image, pamtowinicon as-
sumes the whole image to be fully opaque.
BMP Output
When BMP encoding an image, pamtowinicon tries to use the most compact
BI_RGB format allowed for icon images with a color depth of eight bits
per channel.
pamtowinicon generates neither 16-bit BI_RGB nor BI_BITFIELDS BMP en-
coded images, even if the maxval of the input PAM is not 255.
SEE ALSO
• winicontopam(1)
• ppmtowinicon(1)
• pam(1)
• Windows Icons(1)
For information on the PNG format, see ]8;;http://schaik.com/png\http://schaik.com/png]8;;\ .
HISTORY
pamtowinicon was new in Netpbm 10.63 (June 2013). It obsoleted ppm-
towinicon by providing more function and conforming better to Netpbm
conventions.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2013 by Ludolf Holzheid.
Translated to Netpbm coding style by Bryan Henderson.
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/pamtowinicon.html
netpbm documentation 12 April 2013 Pamtowinicon User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 05:59:30 CET 2025.