The latest release of the popular netpbm package has been installed on
the Computer Centre's Digital UNIX hosts. Previously, a number of the
utilities which form the package have been available from a CD-ROM of
free software mounted as /usr/local/freeware/bin
" Netpbm is a toolkit for conversion of images between a variety of different formats, as well as to allow a few basic image operations."
/usr/local/netpbm in your PATH and make
sure it appears before
/usr/local/freeware/bin in the PATH list. Most, if not all of the netpbm commands act as filters of standard input to standard output, or accept a filename as the input specification.
For example, the following commands both display the latest JCUMetSat image on an X-Windows display after converting it from ILBM format to PPM format.
cat ~ftp/JCUMetSat/ausllast.iff | ilbmtoppm | xv - &
ilbmtoppm ~ftp/JCUMetSat/ausllast.iff | xv - &
For example, type,
man ppmtogif
" Some people get confused by all the different names. If you want to convert a pbm file to a Sun raster file, is it pbmtorast, pgmtorast, ppmtorast, or pnmtorast? In this case some of the confusion might be because previous versions of the package did in fact have both pbmtorast and ppmtorast. But mostly it's just too many different things to hold in your short term memory. Fine, so don't even try to remember what's what. That's what computers are for. Unix, at least BSD Unix, has this great indexing feature on the "man" program. You say "man -k" and it gives you all the one-line descriptions with that keyword in them. All the PBMPLUS man pages have nice useful one-line descriptions, that mention all the relevant keywords. Try it, you'll like it."
For example, try typing,
man -k gif
See below for the file formats handled by netpbm.
" Netpbm is based on the widely spread Pbmplus package (release: 10 Dec 91). On top of that, a lot of improvements and additions have been made. After the latest release of Pbmplus, a lot of additional filters have been circulating on the net. The aim of Netpbm was, to collect these and to turn them into a package. This work has been performed by a group of programmers all over the world.Please note, that this is not an official Pbmplus release. The code in this release is merely a collection of code from various sources around the world. Not all of the new code parts follow the high standard of programming of Pbmplus. We have tried to make the code portable to as many systems as possible, but we haven't cleaned up all routines. We hope that this release will help the many users of Pbmplus to upgrade their code all in one piece, instead of having to hunt down different code fragments at different sites around the world. We also hope, that our effort will help the author of Pbmplus, Jef Poskanzer, to make a new official release soon."
"Extended Portable Bitmap Toolkit PBMPLUS is a toolkit for converting various image formats to and from portable formats, and therefore to and from each other. The idea is, if you want to convert among N image formats, you only need 2*N conversion filters, instead of the N^2 you would need if you wrote each one separately.
Distribution of 10dec91
Previous distribution 30oct91
In addition to the converters, the package includes some simple tools for manipulating the portable formats.
The package is broken up into four parts. First is PBM, for bitmaps (1 bit per pixel). Then there is PGM, for grayscale images. Next is PPM, for full-color images. Last, there is PNM, which does content-independent manipulations on any of the three internal formats, and also handles external formats that have multiple types.
The parts are upwards compatible: PGM reads both PGM and PBM files and writes PGM; PPM reads all three and writes PPM; and PNM reads all three and writes, usually, the same type as it read. Whenever PNM makes an exception and "promotes" a file to a higher format, it lets you know. "
... if you have access to Usenet, there's a newsgroup called alt.graphics.pixutils which is specifically for discussion of image conversion and editing packages such as PBMPLUS."
PBM handles the following black&white formats:
Sun icon file reading writing
X10 and X11 bitmap file reading writing
MacPaint reading writing
CMU window manager format reading writing
MGR format reading writing
Group 3 FAX reading writing
GEM .img format reading writing
Bennet Yee's "face" format reading writing
Atari Degas .pi3 format reading writing
Andrew Toolkit raster object reading writing
Xerox doodle brushes reading
ASCII graphics writing
HP LaserJet format writing
GraphOn graphics writing
BBN BitGraph graphics writing
Printronix format writing
Gemini 10x printer format writing
Epson printer format writing
Unix plot(5) file writing
Zinc Interface Library icon writing
PGM handles the following grayscale formats:
Usenix FaceSaver(tm) file reading writing
FITS reading writing
Lisp Machine bit-array-file reading writing
raw grayscale bytes (e.g. the Molecular
Dynamics and Leica CSLM formats) reading
Biorad CSLM images reading
HIPS reading
PostScript "image" data reading
PPM handles the following color formats:
GIF reading writing
IFF ILBM reading writing
PICT reading writing
Atari Degas .pi1 format reading writing
XPM (X Window System ASCII pixmaps) reading writing
PC Paintbrush .pcx format reading writing
TrueVision Targa file reading writing
HP PaintJet format reading writing
Abekas YUV format reading writing
MTV/PRT ray-tracer output reading
QRT ray-tracer output reading
Img-whatnot file reading
Xim file reading
Atari uncompressed Spectrum reading
Atari compressed Spectrum reading
NCSA Interactive Color Raster writing
X11 "puzzle" file writing
Motif UIL icon file writing
DEC sixel format writing
AutoCAD slide format reading writing
AutoCAD DXB format writing
PNM handles the following multi-type formats:
Sun raster file reading writing
TIFF reading writing
X11 window dump file reading writing
X10 window dump file reading
PostScript writing
Zeiss CSLM images (the old format) reading