PGMTOLISPM(1)

💅 pgmtolispm — NAME, bestie ✨

okay so pgmtolispm — she converts a PGM image to Lisp Machine format. that's it. that's her whole thing. and she's serving it in the General Commands Manual (section 1), if you were wondering where to find her 🫶

---

📜 SYNOPSIS

pgmtolispm

[pgmfile]

like. that's the whole invocation. she takes a [pgmfile] and she goes 💅

---

🌸 DESCRIPTION

okay so first things first: this program is part of Netpbm(1). family affair. love that for her.

So what she DOES is: pgmtolispm reads a PGM image as input and produces a Lisp Machine bitmap as output. slay.

and here's the lore, because this is genuinely iconic: this is the file format read by the tv:read-bit-array-file function on TI Explorer and Symbolics lisp machines. vintage. museum-grade. no cap.

Now — plot twist — if you give her a PGM (instead of a PBM), pgmtolispm outputs a multi-plane image. is that useful? honestly? probably not, unless you have a color lisp machine. like. do you, bestie. do you have a color lisp machine. 🙈

and the sad part, the 😭 part: multi-plane bitmaps on lisp machines ARE color, but the lispm image file format does not include a color map, so we have to treat it as a graymap instead. it's giving tragedy. it is unfortunate. that's literally what the manpage says. unfortunate. ✨

---

✨ OPTIONS ✨

okay so here's the thing, and don't be mad:

• there are literally no command line options defined specifically for pgmtolispm. none. zero. she's a minimalist. 💅

BUT — and this is the important but — she does recognize the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm. (See Common Options.)

that's it. that's the options section. go read the common options, iykyk 🦋

---

👀 SEE ALSO

• lispmtopgm(1)
• pgm(1)

the first one is literally her in reverse and that's the friend group 🌈

---

⚠️ LIMITATIONS

okay so here's where you need to pay attention, bestie, because this one actually bites:

• Output width is always rounded up to the nearest multiple of 32. always. no negotiating.

might that not be what you want? sure. but honestly, it probably is what you want — and here's the reason, no cap: arrays which are not modulo 32 cannot be passed to the Lispm BITBLT function, and thus cannot easily be displayed on the screen. so. the rounding is a feature, she's doing you a favor, periodt 💖

• No color.

that's the whole bullet. no color. devastating. moving on. 💀

---

👑 AUTHOR

Copyright (C) 1991 by Jamie Zawinski and Jef Poskanzer.

legends. absolute icons. we stan 🫶

---

📖 DOCUMENT SOURCE

fun fact about how this page even exists: this manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool makeman from HTML source. the master documentation lives at:

http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pgmtolispm.html

that's the source of truth, bestie, go look if you want the deep lore 🧚

---

and that's the whole page ✨ — this was the Pgmtolispm User Manual (section 1), delivered to you by netpbm documentation, dated 06 March 1990. she's been serving lisp machine bitmaps since before either of us was born and honestly? main character energy. mwah 💅🎀