PNMINDEX(1)

💖 PNMINDEX(1) — the Pnmindex User Manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about pnmindex, a genuine icon from the General Commands Manual side of the Netpbm universe. it's giving contact sheet. it's giving thumbnail factory. it's giving "I have 400 PNM files and I need to see them all at once." let's GO ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pnmindex — build a visual index of a bunch of PNM images

like, you hand it a pile of images, it hands you back a collage. that's the whole vibe. 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pnmindex

[-size=N]

[-across=N]

[-black]

[-title=title]

[-quant|-noquant]

[-colors=N]

pnmfile ...

and then, the lil quality-of-life notes that are lowkey iconic:

• you can use the minimum unique abbreviation of the options (so you don't have to type the whole thing out, slay)
• you can use two hyphens instead of one
• you can separate an option name from its value with white space instead of an equals sign

periodt. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so this program is part of Netpbm(1). that's the family. we love the family.

pnmindex creates an index image containing thumbnail (small) versions of a bunch of PNM files you supply — it's akin to a photographic "contact sheet." very much the classic "print out all your film frames on one page" energy, but make it digital. 📸

pnmindex labels each thumbnail and, optionally, contains a title. (yes, you can title the whole thing. main character energy for your collage.)

now, real talk, because these are genuinely different tools and you don't want to be using the wrong one:

• if you just want to concatenate some images together in a grid, use pamundice for that. that's the grid one.
• if you want to take apart the image you generated with pnmindex, use pamdice or pamcut. slicey slicey 🔪

and heads up bestie: the program can generate large temporary files. by default, these go in directory /tmp, but you can use the TMPDIR environment variable to have them somewhere else. plan accordingly, okay? your little root partition is fragile and precious. 😭

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

in addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options), pnmindex recognizes the following command line options:

• -size=N — the size of each thumbnail. the image is scaled down to fit maximally inside a N x N pixel box without changing its aspect ratio. if the input image is already smaller than this, its size remains the same in the output (no upscaling, we respect her). the value must be at least 1. the default is 100.
• -across=N — this is the number of thumbnails in each row. the value must be at least 1. the default is 6.
• -black — this controls the color of the padding between the images. by default it is white and the labels are black lettering on white background, but the -black option reverses this. (dark mode mode. 🖤)
• -title=title — this specifies a title to be placed at the top of the image. the title value must be in ASCII. characters that are not valid ASCII are not rendered. default is no title.
• -noquant — disables color quantization. by default, if any input image is PPM, the program reduces the number of colors to the number of colors specified by -colors. (yes, the original really does have that stray ) in there. heritage. we keep it. 🙈)
• -quant — this option has no effect; it explicitly selects the default behavior of quantizing colors. see -noquant.
• -colors=N — the maximum number of colors allowed in the overall image. if it would otherwise have more colors than these, pnmindex quantizes the result. and okay, this part is genuinely a whole ritual, so pay attention: to reduce the effect of the colors in one thumbnail on the colors used for another, the program quantizes colors to this number in each thumbnail independently, then quantizes the colors in each row of thumbnails to this number, then quantizes the colors in the entire output image to this number. three passes. she's thorough. keep up. ✨

this value is meaningless if you specify the -noquant option or if no input image is PPM.

the default is 256.

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

before Netpbm 11.05 (December 2023), the Netpbm common option -plain was not implemented. lore dropped. 📜

also, real ones know the raw source of this page has a lil stray line in it that just says .UN seealso — no cap, it's sitting right there between HISTORY and SEE ALSO. i am reporting this faithfully because my job is the facts, not the cleanup. 💀

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🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

pamscale(1), pamcat(1), pbmtext(1), pnmquant(1), pamcut(1), pamdice(1), pamundice(1), pnmtile(1), pnm(1)

the whole girl group. the whole ensemble. go read them all, i'll wait. 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

copyright (C) 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.

-title and -noquant added 2000 by John Heidemann.

legends. both of them. we stan. 💜

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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/pnmindex.html

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this was generated from netpbm documentation on 23 November 2023, so if you're reading this in the future and something's changed, don't come for me, come for the source. mwah 😘💖 ✨ slay, and remember: quantize responsibly 🌈