PPM Format Specification(5) File Formats Manual PPM Format Specification(5)
NAME
PPM - Netpbm color image format
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
The PPM format is a lowest common denominator color image file format.
It should be noted that this format is egregiously inefficient. It is
highly redundant, while containing a lot of information that the human
eye can't even discern. Furthermore, the format allows very little in-
formation about the image besides basic color, which means you may have
to couple a file in this format with other independent information to
get any decent use out of it. However, it is very easy to write and an-
alyze programs to process this format, and that is the point.
It should also be noted that files often conform to this format in every
respect except the precise semantics of the sample values. These files
are useful because of the way PPM is used as an intermediary format.
They are informally called PPM files, but to be absolutely precise, you
should indicate the variation from true PPM. For example, "PPM using
the red, green, and blue colors that the scanner in question uses."
The name "PPM" is an acronym derived from "Portable Pixel Map." Images
in this format (or a precursor of it) were once also called "portable
pixmaps."
THE FORMAT
The format definition is as follows. You can use the libnetpbm(1) C
subroutine library to read and interpret the format conveniently and ac-
curately.
A PPM file consists of a sequence of one or more PPM images. There are
no data, delimiters, or padding before, after, or between images.
Each PPM image consists of the following:
• A "magic number" for identifying the file type. A ppm image's
magic number is the two characters "P6".
• Whitespace (blanks, TABs, CRs, LFs).
• A width, formatted as ASCII characters in decimal.
• Whitespace.
• A height, again in ASCII decimal.
• Whitespace.
• The maximum color value (Maxval), again in ASCII decimal. Must
be less than 65536 and more than zero.
• A single whitespace character (usually a newline).
• A raster of Height rows, in order from top to bottom. Each row
consists of Width pixels, in order from left to right. Each
pixel is a triplet of red, green, and blue samples, in that or-
der. Each sample is represented in pure binary by either 1 or 2
bytes. If the Maxval is less than 256, it is 1 byte. Otherwise,
it is 2 bytes. The most significant byte is first.
A row of an image is horizontal. A column is vertical. The pix-
els in the image are square and contiguous.
In the raster, the sample values are "nonlinear." They are pro-
portional to the intensity of the ITU-R Recommendation BT.709
red, green, and blue in the pixel, adjusted by the BT.709 gamma
transfer function. (That transfer function specifies a gamma
number of 2.2 and has a linear section for small intensities). A
value of Maxval for all three samples represents CIE D65 white
and the most intense color in the color universe of which the im-
age is part (the color universe is all the colors in all images
to which this image might be compared).
BT.709's range of channel values (16-240) is irrelevant to PPM.
ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 is a renaming of the former CCIR Rec-
ommendation 709. When CCIR was absorbed into its parent organi-
zation, the ITU, ca. 2000, the standard was renamed. This docu-
ment once referred to the standard as CIE Rec. 709, but it isn't
clear now that CIE ever sponsored such a standard.
Note that another popular color space is the newer sRGB. A com-
mon variation from PPM is to substitute this color space for the
one specified. You can use pnmgamma to convert between this
variation and true PPM.
Note that a common variation from the PPM format is to have the
sample values be "linear," i.e. as specified above except without
the gamma adjustment. pnmgamma takes such a PPM variant as input
and produces a true PPM as output.
Strings starting with "#" may be comments, the same as with PBM(1).
Note that you can use pamdepth to convert between the format with 1 byte
per sample and the one with 2 bytes per sample.
All characters referred to herein are encoded in ASCII. "newline"
refers to the character known in ASCII as Line Feed or LF. A "white
space" character is space, CR, LF, TAB, VT, or FF (I.e. what the ANSI
standard C isspace() function calls white space).
Plain PPM
There is actually another version of the PPM format that is fairly rare:
"plain" PPM format. The format above, which generally considered the
normal one, is known as the "raw" PPM format. See pbm (1) for some com-
mentary on how plain and raw formats relate to one another and how to
use them.
The difference in the plain format is:
• There is exactly one image in a file.
• The magic number is P3 instead of P6.
• Each sample in the raster is represented as an ASCII decimal num-
ber (of arbitrary size).
• Each sample in the raster has white space before and after it.
There must be at least one character of white space between any
two samples, but there is no maximum. There is no particular
separation of one pixel from another -- just the required separa-
tion between the blue sample of one pixel from the red sample of
the next pixel.
• No line should be longer than 70 characters.
Here is an example of a small image in this format.
P3
# feep.ppm
4 4
15
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 0 15
0 0 0 0 15 7 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 7 0 0 0
15 0 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
There is a newline character at the end of each of these lines.
Programs that read this format should be as lenient as possible, accept-
ing anything that looks remotely like a PPM image.
INTERNET MEDIA TYPE
No Internet Media Type (aka MIME type, content type) for PPM has been
registered with IANA, but the value image/x-portable-pixmap is conven-
tional.
Note that the PNM Internet Media Type image/x-portable-anymap also ap-
plies.
FILE NAME
There are no requirements on the name of a PPM file, but the convention
is to use the suffix ".ppm". "pnm" is also conventional, for cases
where distinguishing between the particular subformats of PNM is not
convenient.
COMPATIBILITY
Before April 2000, a raw format PPM file could not have a maxval greater
than 255. Hence, it could not have more than one byte per sample. Old
programs may depend on this.
Before July 2000, there could be at most one image in a PPM file. As a
result, most tools to process PPM files ignore (and don't read) any data
after the first image.
SEE ALSO
pnm(1), pgm(1), pbm(1), pam(1), programs that process PPM(1)
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/ppm.html
netpbm documentation 09 October 2016 PPM Format Specification(5)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 07:03:51 CET 2025.