PPMTOASCII(1)

💖 ppmtoascii — the manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, so this is Ppmtoascii User Manual, section 1 (General Commands Manual), and it's literally about turning your pics into terminal art. buckle up 🎀

---

✨ NAME ✨

ppmtoascii — convert a PPM image to ASCII graphics with ANSI terminal color 🌈

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ppmtoascii

[-1x2|-2x4]

[ppmfile]

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so first thing, this program is part of Netpbm(1). she's not alone, she's got a whole family 💅

ppmtoascii reads a PPM image as input and produces a somewhat crude ASCII graphic image as output, with ANSI terminal control characters so it has crude color when sent to a color text terminal. like. it's giving retro. it's giving "I made this in a terminal and I'm proud." 🫶

and bestie, hear me when I say: there is no converter for the other direction. that's it. that's the note. no reverse. no take-backs. 🙈

now, ppmtoterm does a similar thing, but displays each character of the image as a single pixel (using the same dense character for every pixel), whereas ppmtoascii combines 2 or 8 pixels into one character, where the character roughly represents those particular pixels. so yes they're siblings but they do NOT dress the same 💀

note: ANSI provides for only eight colors (including black and white). that's the whole palette. that's the vibe. 🎨

also note: an ANSI terminal can't display a single character in multiple colors, so where a character represents 8 pixels of differing colors, the color of the character is one that is the average of the colors of those pixels. it blends. it compromises. it's an icon honestly. 😭

and lastly, pbmtoascii does the same thing for PBM images, with no terminal control characters (because none are needed for a strictly black and white image). no color drama needed, it's above it ✨

---

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

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

• -1x2, -2x4 — these two give you alternate ways for the pixels to get mapped to characters. with 1x2, the default, each character represents a group of 1 pixel across by 2 pixels down. with -2x4, each character represents 2 pixels across by 4 pixels down. two whole mapping moods, pick your fighter 👑

---

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

pbmtoascii(1) ppmtoterm(1) ppm(1)

---

🌟 HISTORY 🌟

ppmtoascii was new in Netpbm 10.51 (June 2010). Frank Ch. Eigler derived it from pbmtoascii. so yeah, it's a 2010 baby with a very respectable origin story 🍼

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Copyright (C) 2010 by Frank Ch. Eigler.

---

🧚 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/ppmtoascii.html

---

netpbm documentation · 09 April 2010 · Ppmtoascii User Manual(1)

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate it, go convert something 💅✨🦋🌸💖