Pnmtopnm User Manual(0) Pnmtopnm User Manual(0)NAMEpnmtopnm - copy a PNM image
SYNOPSISpnmtopnm
[pnmfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pnmtopnm simply copies a PNM image to Standard Output. The output has
the same major PNM format (PBM, PGM, or PPM) and maxval as the input.
This may seem an unnecessary duplication of cat, but it lets you con‐
vert between the plain (ASCII) and raw (binary) subformats of PNM. Use
the -plain Netpbm common option to ensure the output is plain PNM, and
don't use -plain to ensure the output is raw PNM. See
Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ .
You don't normally need to convert between the PNM subformats, because
any program that uses the Netpbm library to read a PNM image will read
all of them directly. But there are a lot of programs that don't use
the Netpbm library and understand only the raw format. Plain format is
nice because it is human readable; people often use it to debug pro‐
grams that process PNM images.
pnmtopnm is really just another name for the program pamtopnm. The
latter does the job because like any Netpbm program that takes PAM
input via the Netpbm programming library facilities, it also takes PNM
input.
HISTORYpnmtopnm was new in Netpbm 10.23 (July 2004). It obsoleted pnmto‐
plainpnm, which specifically did the conversion to plain PNM. There
was no program to explicitly convert to raw PNM, but many Netpbm pro‐
grams can be made, with the right options, to be idempotent (i.e. to do
the same thing as pnmtopnm).
Then David Jones realized that the existing pamtopnm already did every‐
thing that pnmtopnm did and more, so in Netpbm 10.27 (March 2005), pnm‐
topnm became simply an alternate name for pamtopnm.
SEE ALSOppmtoppm(1)pgmtopgm(1)pamtopnm(1)pnm(1)netpbm documentation 24 March 2005 Pnmtopnm User Manual(0)