PBMTOASCII(1)

💖 PBMTOASCII 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're about to turn Actual Pixels into Actual Letters and it's giving iconic. this is the Pbmtoascii User Manual, section 1 of the General Commands Manual, and yes, we're doing the whole thing, no skimming, no skipping, no "tl;dr" (well, maybe a lil tl;dr, but not one that loses a single fact 😌).

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✨ NAME ✨

pbmtoascii — convert a PBM image to ASCII graphics

like. it takes a picture. and makes it letters. the way that it works?? obsessed. 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pbmtoascii

[-1x2|-2x4]

[pbmfile]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so this program is part of Netpbm(1), which is the whole Netpbm family, and if you know you know.

pbmtoascii reads a PBM image as its input and produces, quote unquote, a somewhat crude ASCII graphic image as its output. bestie, "somewhat crude" is not me being mean, that is literally the documentation's own description and honestly? the crudeness is part of the charm. it's giving retro. it's giving terminal-core. it's giving main character energy on a display that has no graphics whatsoever. 💅

and lowkey the best part: you can go the other way too! to convert back, you use asciitopgm(1). round trip, no cap. 🫶

also there's ppmtoterm, which does a similar thing but for color images, the kind you display on color text terminals. so if you've got colors and you're feeling fancy, that's your girl. 🌈

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

okay so, in addition to the options that are common to every single program based on libnetpbm (and most notably -quiet — go look at Common Options if you wanna read up, i'm not gonna retype the whole thing here), pbmtoascii recognizes these command line options:

• -1x2 — the mapping option that gives you one of the two alternate ways pixels get mapped to characters. with 1x2 — which is the default, fyi — each character represents a group of 1 pixel across by 2 pixels down. because you can see the individual pixels in this mode, it is genuinely useful for previewing small images on a non-graphics terminal. tiny image, big vibes, you can still make out what's going on. 🔍
• -2x4 — the other mapping option. with -2x4, each character represents 2 pixels across by 4 pixels down. this mode lets you display larger images on a small display, but — and i cannot stress this enough — it obscures pixel-level details. like, the details are gone gone. so if you needed those fine details, this is not the move. 🙈

and 2x4 mode is also good for displaying PGM images — dead useful, actually — like this:

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

that, per the docs, should give good results. 🎀

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🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

• asciitopgm(1)
• ppmtoascii(1)
• ppmtoterm(1)
• pbm(1)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright (C) 1988, 1992 by Jef Poskanzer. periodt. iykyk. 💜

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🧚 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

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and that's the whole thing, bestie, every option, every mode, every little crumb of detail, all accounted for ✨ no facts were harmed in the making of this vibe. this was netpbm documentation, dated 02 April 2010, from the Pbmtoascii User Manual(1) — k byeee, go convert something cute 💖🌸🦋