Pnmpad User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pnmpad User Manual(1)
NAME
pnmpad - add borders to a PNM image
SYNOPSIS
pnmpad [-color=color [-promote={none|format|all}] |-detect-background
|-extend-edge |-white |-black ] [-width=pixels] [-halign=ratio]
[-mwidth=pixels] [-left=pixels] [-right=pixels] [-height=pixels]
[-valign=ratio] [-mheight=pixels] [-top=pixels] [-bottom=pixels] [-re-
portonly] [-verbose] [pnmfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pnmpad reads a Netpbm image as input and outputs a PNM image that is the
input image plus borders of the color and sizes specified.
You can use pamcomp to add borders of any content - solid color,
pattern, or whatever. For example, if you wanted to add 10 pixels of
rainbow borders to the top and bottom of a 100x100 image, you could
create a
100x120 rainbow image (e.g. with ppmrainbow) and then
use pamcomp to insert your 100x100 image into the center of it.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), pnmpad recognizes the fol-
lowing command line options:
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 an equals sign between an option name and its value.
-color=color
-detect-background
-extend-edge
-white
-black This specifies the color of the padding. color is like the ]8;;libnetpbm_image.html#colorname\argu-
ment of the pnm_parsecolor() library routine]8;;\ .
-detect-background means the program uses the color of the top
left pixel of the input as the pad color. Note that this could
cause odd results if you aren't padding the top or left of the
image.
You may specify only one of -white, -black, -color, and -detect-
background.
-extend-edge says to pad by duplicating the adjacent edge of the
image pixel by pixel. E.g. if the top row of the image is 20
white pixels followed by 10 black pixels, every row of padding
added to the top of the image is 20 white pixels followed by 20
black pixels.
By default, the padding is black.
-white and -black are for backward compatibility. -color, -de-
tect-background, and -extend-edge were new with Netpbm 11.05 (De-
cember 2023).
-left=pixels
-right=pixels
-width=width
-halign=ratio
-mwidth=pixels
Specify amount of left and right padding in pixels.
-left and -right directly specify the amount of padding added to
the left and right sides, respectively, of the image.
Alternatively, you can specify -width and just one of -left and
-right and pnmpad calculates the required padding on the other
side to make the output width pixels wide. If the -width value
is less than the width of the input image plus the specified
padding, pnmpad ignores -width.
If you specify all three of -width, -left, and -right, you must
ensure that the -left and -right padding are sufficient to make
the image at least as wide as -width specifies, and in that case
-width has no effect on the output. Otherwise, pnmpad fails.
When you specify -width without -left or -right, and -width is
larger than the input image, pnmpad chooses left and right
padding amounts in a certain ratio. That ratio defaults to half,
but you can set it to anything (from 0 to 1) with the -halign op-
tion. If the input image is already at least as wide as -width
specifies, pnmpad adds no padding.
Common values for -halign are:
0.0 left aligned
0.5 center aligned (default)
1.0 right aligned
-mwidth=pixels says to pad to a multiple of pixels pixels. E.g.
if pixels is 10, the output image width will be a multiple of 10
pixels. pnmpad adds to whatever padding the other options say to
do to get to this multiple. It divides that padding between the
left and right sides of the image to maintain the ratio the other
options produce. E.g. if you say -left=10 -right=10 -mwidth=50
with a 100-pixel image, you end up with a 150-pixel image with
the extra padding split evenly between left and right for a total
of 25 pixels of padding on the left and 25 on the right. If the
other options indicate no padding, pnmpad adds padding in the ra-
tio specified by -halign and if -halign is not specified, equally
on both sides.
Before Netpbm 10.97 (December 2021), pnmpad does not allow
-halign with -mwidth and adds padding only on the right when
-mwidth is specified and the other options indicate no padding.
Before Netpbm 10.72 (September 2015), there is no -mwidth.
Before Netpbm 10.23 (July 2004), pnmpad did not allow the -left
or -right option together with -width.
-top=pixels
-bottom=pixels
-height=height
-valign=ratio
-mheight=pixels
These options determine the vertical padding. They are analogous
to the horizontal padding options above.
-promote={none|format|all}
This option tells what to do when the -color option specifies a
color that cannot be represented in the input format, which ordi-
narily is also the output format. For example, if the input is
PGM (which can represent only shades of gray), and you specify
-color=red, should pnmpad make the padding gray or make the out-
put PPM?
none
Make the output have the same format and maxval as the input.
Adjust the pad color to the nearest color possible in that
format
(black, white, or a shade of gray).
format
Make the output have the same maxval as the input, but make
the output format PPM if the pad color is not black, white,
or gray.
all
Make the format and maxval of the output capable of representing
the
pad color. Make the format the least expressive format ca-
pable of
representing the pad color. Make the maxval the larger of
255 and
the maxval of the input image.
The default is -promote=all.
Note that this promotion happens even if no actual padding hap-
pens, meaning it isn't really necessary. The promotion is based
on what would be required to represent padding of the specified
color.
This option is valid only when you also specify -color.
This option was new in Netpbm 11.05 (December 2023).
-reportonly
This causes pnmpad to write to Standard Output a description of
the
padding it would have done instead of producing an output im-
age. See
]8;;#reportonly\below]8;;\ for a description of this output and ways
to use it.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.89 (December 2019).
-verbose
This causes verbose messages.
REPORT ONLY
When you specify -reportonly, pnmpad does not produce an
output image. Instead, it writes to Standard Output a description of
the
padding it would have done without -reportonly.
That description is one line of text, containing 6 decimal numbers of
pixels, separated by spaces:
• left padding
• right padding
• top padding
• bottom padding
• output width
• output height
Example:
4 3 0 2 100 100
One use for this is to make padding which is fancier than the black and
white that pnmpad can do.
In the following example, we pad an image with 10 pixels of gray all
around, without knowing the original image dimensions beforehand. We
do
this by generating a gray image with pbmmake and then pasting the
subject image into the middle of it.
The example uses shell arrays, such as exist in Bash, but not Dash.
pad=($(pnmpad -reportonly -left=10 -right=10 -top=10 -bottom=10 input.ppm))
pbmmake -gray ${pad[4]} ${pad[5]} | \
pnmpaste input.ppm ${pad[0]} ${pad[2]} -
HISTORY
The command line syntax was originally more of a traditional Unix syn-
tax,
with single-character margin size options -l, -r, -t,
and -b that took arguments concatenated to the option name, such
as -l50. This is in contrast to the more modern syntax used by
essentially all Netpbm programs, in which an option such as -left
(which can still be abbreviated -l) must have its name and value as
separate command line arguments (e.g. -l 50).
The new syntax was accepted and the old syntax deprecated and removed
from
documentation in Netpbm 9.25 (March 2002), and was no longer accepted
in
Netpbm 11.05 (December 2023).
The code was broken for most of that time so that an attempt to use
the old
syntax would fail anyway. The bug was discovered only in testing; no
user
ever reported encountering it.
SEE ALSO
pbmmake(1), pnmpaste(1), pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), pnmmar-
gin(1), pbm(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2002 by Martin van Beilen
Copyright (C) 1990 by Angus Duggan
Copyright (C) 1989 by Jef Poskanzer.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, pro-
vided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both
that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
documentation. This software is provided "as is" without express or im-
plied warranty.
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/pnmpad.html
netpbm documentation 10 August 2024 Pnmpad User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:19:18 CET 2025.