Ppmtoascii User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Ppmtoascii User Manual(1)
NAME
ppmtoascii - convert a PPM image to ASCII graphics with ANSI terminal
color
SYNOPSIS
ppmtoascii
[-1x2|-2x4]
[ppmfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
ppmtoascii reads a PPM image as input and produces a somewhat crude
ASCII graphic image as output, with ANSI terminal control characters so
it has crude color when sent to a color text terminal.
There is no converter for the other direction.
ppmtoterm does a similar thing, but displays each character of the image
as a single pixel (using the same dense character for every pixel),
whereas ppmtoascii combines 2 or 8 pixels into one character, where the
character roughly represents those particular pixels.
Note that ANSI provides for only eight colors (including black and
white).
Note that an ANSI terminal can't display a single character in multiple
colors, so where a character represents 8 pixels of differing colors,
the color of the character is one that is the average of the colors of
those pixels.
pbmtoascii does the same thing for PBM images, with no terminal control
characters (because none are needed for a strictly black and white im-
age).
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), ppmtoascii 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.
SEE ALSO
pbmtoascii(1) ppmtoterm(1) ppm(1)
HISTORY
ppmtoascii was new in Netpbm 10.51 (June 2010). Frank Ch. Eigler de-
rived it from pbmtoascii.
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 2010 by Frank Ch. Eigler.
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/ppmtoascii.html
netpbm documentation 09 April 2010 Ppmtoascii User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 04:56:44 CET 2025.