man > asciitopgm(1)

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 bottom as necessary.

       The divisor value is an integer (decimal) by which the blackness of an input character is di‐
       vided.  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 values.  (In Fortran carriage control, the first
       character of every line sent to the printer tells how much to advance the paper, with + mean‐
       ing 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 ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), 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 AT 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)