Pbmtoascii User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pbmtoascii User Manual(1)
NAME
pbmtoascii - convert a PBM image to ASCII graphics
SYNOPSIS
pbmtoascii
[-1x2|-2x4]
[pbmfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pbmtoascii reads a PBM image as input and produces a somewhat crude
ASCII graphic image as output.
To convert back, use asciitopgm(1).
ppmtoterm does a similar thing for color images to be displayed on color
text terminals.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), pbmtoascii recognizes the
following command line options:
The -1x2 and -2x4 options give you two alternate ways for the pixels to
get mapped to characters. With 1x2, the default, each character repre-
sents a group of 1 pixel across by 2 pixels down. With -2x4, each char-
acter represents 2 pixels across by 4 pixels down. With the 1x2 mode
you can see the individual pixels, so it's useful for previewing small
images on a non-graphics terminal. The 2x4 mode lets you display larger
images on a small display, but it obscures pixel-level details. 2x4
mode is also good for displaying PGM images:
pamscale -width 158 | pnmnorm | pamditherbw -threshold | pbmtoascii -2x4
should give good results.
SEE ALSO
asciitopgm(1), ppmtoascii(1), ppmtoterm(1), pbm(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1988, 1992 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/pbmtoascii.html
netpbm documentation 02 April 2010 Pbmtoascii User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:59:27 CET 2025.