PPMQUANT(1)

📦
version 11.13.03 · 3 versions
, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 PPMQUANT 💖

okay bestie, gather round, we're doing the ppmquant page from the Netpbm user manual. it's a classic. it's also, um. a fossil. but we love her anyway 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

ppmquant — quantize the colors in a PPM image down to a specified number 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ppmquant [-floyd|-fs] ncolors [ppmfile]
ppmquant [-floyd|-fs] [-nofloyd|-nofs] -mapfile mapfile [ppmfile]

okay so housekeeping rules for the flags, and these apply to everything in here:

  • All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. so like, you don't have to type the whole thing, just enough that it's unambiguous. queen of efficiency.
  • You may use two hyphens instead of one to designate an option. -fs and --fs, both iconic, both valid.
  • You may use either white space or equals signs between an option name and its value. so -mapfile mapfile and -mapfile=mapfile are both fine ✨

💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

This program is part of Netpbm(1). 🫶

okay, real talk. ppmquant is obsolete. like, it's giving "still on the group chat but never responds." All it does now is invoke pnmquant or pnmremap. That's the whole job. It's a middleman. It's a vibe.

So: you should use one of those programs if you're writing a new program, or if you're modifying an old program and your program doesn't have to work with a version of Netpbm before 9.21 (January 2001). ppmquant exists only for name compatibility. that's it. that's the whole reason she's still here. legacy queen 👑

mapping the lore:

  • pnmquant is fully backward compatible with ppmquant without the -mapfile option.
  • pnmremap is fully backward compatible with ppmquant with the -mapfile option.

Except with differences suggested by the syntax synopsis above (👀 the synopsis, bestie, look at it), ppmquant's function is the same as pnmquant and pnmremap.

⚠️ history lesson, because it's juicy: before Netpbm 10.19 (November 2003), ppmquant was a completely separate program from pnmquant, and was a bona fide PPM program. Which means if you gave it a PGM or PBM image as input, it would process it as if it were PPM and generate a PPM output. 😭 Now, since it is really a PNM program, it processes PBM and PGM inputs as what they actually are and produces the same kind of output. glow up, honestly.
💀 Note: the reason ppmquant was changed in Netpbm 10.19 is that for some time before that, ppmquant had a serious bug that would have been difficult to fix — it chose the wrong color set. Maintaining two versions of the same code did not make sense. so they deleted one. periodt.

🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

go read those fr fr, they're the main characters now 🌈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer. 🫶

🧚 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/ppmquant.html

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 💖 netpbm documentation, 22 October 2003 — yeah she's vintage, she's an antique, she's archive-core 🦋 mwah, love u, go use pnmquant ✨🌸

📦 where this page comes from