Picttoppm User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Picttoppm User Manual(1)
NAME
picttoppm - convert a Macintosh PICT file to a PPM
SYNOPSIS
picttoppm
[-verbose=n]
[-fullres]
[-noheader]
[-quickdraw] [-fontdir file]
[pictfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
picttoppm reads a PICT file (version 1 or 2) and outputs a PPM image.
PICT is an image format that was developed by Apple Computer in 1984 as
the native format for Macintosh graphics. A PICT image is encoded in
QuickDraw commands. The PICT format is a meta-format that can be used
for both bitmap images and vector images. PICT is also known as "Macin-
tosh Picture" format, or the QuickDraw Picture format.
PICT files are primarily used to exchange graphics between various Mac-
intosh applications.
In MacOS X, PDF replaces PICT as the main graphics format.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), picttoppm recognizes the
following command line options:
-fontdir file
Make the list of BDF fonts in file available for use by picttoppm
when drawing text. See below for the format of the fontdir file.
This is in addition to the built-in fonts and those in the file
fontdir.
-fullres
Force any images in the PICT file to be output with at least
their full resolution. A PICT file may indicate that a contained
image is to be scaled down before output. This option forces im-
ages to retain their sizes and prevent information loss. This
option disables all PICT operations except images.
-noheader
Do not assume the first 512 bytes of the file are a header. All
PICT files have such a header, but this is useful when you have
PICT data that was not stored in the data fork of a PICT file.
-quickdraw
Execute only pure quickdraw operations. In particular, turn off
the interpretation of special PostScript printer operations.
-verbose=n
Print a whole bunch of information about the PICT file and the
conversion process that only picttoppm hackers really care about.
n is the verbosity level, 0-2.
Before Netpbm 10.98 (March 2022), this option is a flag option
that you specify multiple times to specify increasing verbosity.
LIMITATIONS
The PICT file format is a general drawing format. picttoppm does not
recognize all the drawing commands, but it does fully implement all im-
age commands and mostly implements line, rectangle, polygon and text
drawing. It is useful for converting scanned images and some drawing
conversion.
With -fullres, picttoppm ignores text drawing commands. Beginning in
Netpbm 10.45 (December 2008), it issues a warning message when it omits
text for this reason.
FONTS
Some of the information in a PICT file is text, with a number indicating
the font in which the text is supposed to rendered. picttoppm has one
built-in font, but you can add others by directing picttoppm to BDF font
files, which you do with font directory files.
picttoppm automatically uses the file named fontdir in the current di-
rectory, if it exists. You may specify an additional font directory
file with the -fontdir option.
Obviously the font definitions are strongly related to the Macintosh.
You can find more font numbers and information about fonts in Macintosh
documentation.
Font Directory File Format
Each line in the file is either a comment or font information. A com-
ment begins with #. The font information consists of 4 whitespace sepa-
rated fields. The first is the font number, the second is the font size
in pixels, the third is the font style and the fourth is the name of a
BDF file containing the font. The BDF format is defined by the X Window
System and is beyond the scope of this document.
The font number indicates the type face. Here is a list of known font
numbers and their faces.
0 Chicago
1 application font
2 New York
3 Geneva
4 Monaco
5 Venice
6 London
7 Athens
8 San Franciso
9 Toronto
11 Cairo
12 Los Angeles
20 Times Roman
21 Helvetica
22 Courier
23 Symbol
24 Taliesin
The font style indicates a variation on the font. Multiple variations
may apply to a font and the font style is the sum of the variation num-
bers which are:
1 Boldface
2 Italic
4 Underlined
8 Outlined
16 Shadow
32 Condensed
64 Extended
SEE ALSO
Inside Macintosh volumes 1 and 5, ppmtopict(1), ppm(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright 1993 George Phillips
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/picttoppm.html
netpbm documentation 17 June 2006 Picttoppm User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 06:35:56 CET 2025.