ppm
Updated: 03 October 2003
Table Of Contents
NAME
PPM ‐ Netpbm color image format
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm.
The PPM format is a lowest common denominator color image file
format.
It should be noted that this format is egregiously ineffi‐
cient. It is highly
redundant, while containing a lot of information that the hu‐
man 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 de‐
cent use out of
it. However, it is very easy to write and analyze programs to
process this
format, and that is the point.
It should also be noted that files often conform to this for‐
mat 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 for‐
mat. 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 "por‐
table pixmaps."
The format definition is as follows. You can use the libnetpbm
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:
1. A "magic number" for identifying the file type. A ppm im‐
age’s magic
number is the two characters "P6".
2. Whitespace (blanks, TABs, CRs, LFs).
3. A width, formatted as ASCII characters in decimal.
4. Whitespace.
5. A height, again in ASCII decimal.
6. Whitespace.
7. The maximum color value (Maxval), again in ASCII decimal.
Must be less
than 65536 and more than zero.
8. Newline or other single whitespace character.
9. 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 order. 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 signifi‐
cant byte is
first.
A row of an image is horizontal. A column is vertical. The
pixels in the
image are square and contiguous.
10. In the raster, the sample values are "nonlinear." They are
proportional
to the intensity of the ITU‐R Recommendation BT.709 red,
green, and blue
in the pixel, adjusted by the BT.709 gamma transfer func‐
tion. (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 image is part (the color universe is
all the
colors in all images to which this image might be com‐
pared).
ITU‐R Recommendation BT.709 is a renaming of the
former CCIR
Recommendation 709. When CCIR was absorbed into its parent
organization,
the ITU, ca. 2000, the standard was renamed. This document
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 common
variation on PPM is to subsitute this color space for the
one specified.
11. Note that a common variation on 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.
12. Characters from a "#" to the next end‐of‐line, before the
maxval line,
are comments and are ignored.
Note that you can use pamdepth to convert between a the format
with 1 byte
per sample and the one with 2 bytes per sample.
There is actually another version of the PPM format that is
fairly rare:
"plain" PPM format. The format above, which generally consid‐
ered the normal
one, is known as the "raw" PPM format. See pbm for some com‐
mentary on how
plain and raw formats relate to one another.
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 number
(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 particu‐
lar 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 pixmap 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 possi‐
ble, accepting
anything that looks remotely like a pixmap.
COMPATIBILITY
Before April 2000, a raw format PPM file could not have a max‐
val 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, pgm, pbm, pam, programs that process PPM
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.
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Table Of Contents
* NAME
* DESCRIPTION
* COMPATIBILITY
* SEE ALSO
* AUTHOR
