Pnmpaste User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pnmpaste User Manual(1)
NAME
pnmpaste - paste a rectangle into a PNM image
SYNOPSIS
pnmpaste
[-replace | -or | -and | -xor | -nor | -nand | -nxor]
frompnmfile x y [intopnmfile]
You can abbreviate all options to their shortest unique prefix.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pnmpaste reads two PNM images as input and inserts the first image (the
"pasted image") into the second (the "base image") at the specified lo-
cation, and produces a PNM image the same size and type as the base im-
age as output.
Either file name argument (but not both) may be '-' to indicate Standard
Input. If you don't specify the second file argument at all, that's the
same as '-'.
x and y specify the location in the base image at which to put the top
left corner of the pasted image, x giving the horizontal position and x
giving the vertical position. A nonnegative value indicates the number
of pixels right of the right edge or below the top edge of the base im-
age, while a negative value indicates the number of pixels right of the
right edge or below the bottom edge (so x = -5 means 5 pixels left of
the right edge).
If any part of the pasted image does not fit within the base image, pnm-
paste fails.
This tool is most useful in combination with pamcut. For instance, if
you want to edit a small segment of a large image, and your image editor
cannot edit the large image, you can cut out the segment you are inter-
ested in, edit it, and then paste it back in.
Another useful companion tool is pbmmask.
pamcomp is a more general tool, except that it lacks the "or," "and,"
and "xor" functions. pamcomp allows you to specify a transparency mask
in order to have only part of the inserted image get inserted. So the
inserted pixels need not be a rectangle. You can also have the inserted
image be translucent, so the resulting image is a mixture of the in-
serted image and the base image.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), pnmpaste recognizes the
following command line options:
-replace, -or, -and, -xor,
-nor, -nand, -nxor
These option specify the operation to use when doing the paste.
The default is -replace, which means to do the obvious paste: re-
place pixels of the "into" image with those of the "from" image.
-and, -nand, -or, -nor, -xor, and nxor are allowed only if both
input images are PBM images. They say to combine the "from" and
"into" images by performing boolean operations: Each pixel of the
output image is the result of the boolean operation on the corre-
sponding pixels of the two input images, where white is TRUE and
black is FALSE.
Note that this is different from what you would get by doing a
bit arithmetic on the bits in the PBM images, because in PBM,
white is represented by a 0 bit, and 0 in bit arithmetic corre-
sponds to FALSE in boolean arithmetic.
-nand, -nor, and -nxor were new in Netpbm 10.85 (December 2018).
SEE ALSO
pamcomp(1), pamcut(1), pnminvert(1), pnmarith(1), pbmmask(1), pnm(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 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/pnmpaste.html
netpbm documentation 16 December 2018 Pnmpaste User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:19:25 CET 2025.