Manual: asciitopgm

Asciitopgm User Manual(1)			   General Commands Manual			   Asciitopgm User Manual(1)

NAME
       asciitopgm - convert ASCII graphics into a PGM

SYNOPSIS
       asciitopgm [-d divisor] height width [asciifile]

DESCRIPTION
       This program is part of Netpbm(1).

       asciitopgm  reads  ASCII	 data  as input and produces a PGM image with pixel values which are an approximation of the
       "brightness" of the ASCII characters, assuming black-on-white printing.	In other words, a capital M is very dark,  a
       period is very light, and a space is white.

       Obviously, asciitopgm assumes a certain font in assigning a brightness value to a character.

       asciitopgm  considers  ASCII  control  characters  to be all white.  For a lower case character, It assigns a special
       brightnesses which has nothing to do with what it looks like printed.  asciitopgm takes the ASCII character code from
       the lower 7 bits of each input byte.  But it warns you if the most significant bit of any input byte is not zero.

       The output image is height pixels high by width pixels wide, truncating and padding with white on the right and	bot‐
       tom as necessary.

       The  divisor value is an integer (decimal) by which the blackness of an input character is divided.  You can use this
       to adjust the brightness of the output: for example, if the image is too bright, increase the divisor.

       In a sort of reminiscence of Fortran line printer carriage control, where a line starts	with  +	 (plus),  asciitopgm
       combines it with the previous row of output instead of generating a new row.  This allows a larger range of gray val‐
       ues.   (In  Fortran carriage control, the first character of every line sent to the printer tells how much to advance
       the paper, with + meaning not at all, so that the rest of the characters on the line overstrike the ones	 already  on
       the paper.  What asciitopgm does is rather different in that asciitopgm does not reserve the first character of every
       line  that  way.	 If the first character is anything but +, asciitopgm considers it just to be first character of the
       image.

       If you're looking for something that creates an image of text, with that text specified in ASCII, that  is  something
       quite different.	 Use pbmtext for that.

OPTIONS
       In  addition  to	 the  options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see  Common Options ),
       asciitopgm recognizes the following command line option:

       -d divisor
	      Specify the value by which the blackness of an input character is divided.  This is an integer value.  Default
	      value is 1.  Larger values produce darker output images.

SEE ALSO
       pbmtoascii(1), pbmtext(1), pgm(1)

AUTHOR
       Wilson H. Bent. Jr. (whb@usc.edu)

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/asciitopgm.html

netpbm documentation				       20 January 2011				   Asciitopgm User Manual(1)