pbmtoascii(1)

pbmtoascii1

Convert a pbm image to ascii graphics

Usage

pbmtoascii

[-1x2|-2x4]

[pbmfile]

Overview

This program is part of Netpbm(1) .

pbmtoascii reads a PBM image as input and produces a somewhat crude ASCII graphic image as output.

To convert back, use asciitopgm(1) .

ppmtoterm does a similar thing for color images to be displayed on color text terminals.

Options

In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see
Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), pbmtoascii recognizes the following command line options:

The -1x2 and -2x4 options give you two alternate ways for the pixels to get mapped to characters. With 1x2, the default, each character represents a group of 1 pixel across by 2 pixels down. With -2x4, each character represents 2 pixels across by 4 pixels down. With the 1x2 mode you can see the individual pixels, so it's useful for previewing small images on a non-graphics terminal. The 2x4 mode lets you display larger images on a small display, but it obscures pixel-level details. 2x4 mode is also good for displaying PGM images:

pamscale -width 158 | pnmnorm | pamditherbw -threshold | pbmtoascii -2x4

should give good results.

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/pbmtoascii.html

Releases

16 releases since Debian 2.0 (Hamm); the text changed 3 times.

  1. 2.0–11
  2. 12
  3. 13
  4. Arch

Author

Copyright (C) 1988, 1992 by Jef Poskanzer.

From netpbm 10.86.51-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.