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 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 values.  (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)