PPMTOSPU(1)

📦
version 11.13.03 · 2 versions
, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 ppmtospu — the manual page, but make it cute 💖

Ok bestie, pull up a chair, because this is the Ppmtospu User Manual, section (1) of the General Commands Manual, and I am about to make a 1990 Atari image converter sound like the most iconic thing you've ever heard. Because it kind of is. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

ppmtospu — convert a PPM image to an Atari Spectrum 512 image

Like. That's the whole vibe. PPM goes in, Spectrum 512 comes out. 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ppmtospu

[-d0|-d2|-d4] [ppmfile]

And before you ask, yes, the CLI is flexible like that:

  • All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. Short queen behavior. 👑
  • You may use two hyphens instead of one.
  • You may separate an option name and its value with white space instead of an equals sign.

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Okay so first things first: this program is part of Netpbm(1). Family reunion energy. 🫶

What it does: it converts from the PPM format to the uncompressed Spectrum 512 image format used on Atari ST computers. Retro. Nostalgic. Lowkey legendary. 🔥

Input comes from the file you name with the ppmfile argument, or from Standard Input by default. Output goes to Standard Output. Classic.

⚠️ The input must be 320 pixels wide by 200 pixels high. No exceptions, no negotiating, no "but my art is 400px wide". If you have an image of a different size, you can use pamcut or pamscale to force it to these dimensions. Do that first, bestie. 💅

✨ OPTIONS ✨

So in addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm — most notably -quiet, see Common Options — ppmtospu recognizes the following command line options. Here they are, all three of them, and I love them:

  • -d0 — The program does no dithering. Raw. Unfiltered. Just pixels living their truth. 🌈
  • -d2 — The program uses a 2x2 ordered dither. This is the default, so if you say nothing, this is what you get. Silent main character energy. 😌
  • -d4 — The program uses a 4x4 ordered dither. More texture, more drama. ✨

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

Go read these too, they're all in the group chat:

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Copyright (C) 1990 by Steve Belczyk. Legally and emotionally, this is his. 🫡

✨ HISTORY ✨

Okay the lore here is genuinely unhinged, sit down:

This program was new in Netpbm 10.58 (March 2012).

But it was written in 1990. Like, decades before it got adopted. Steve Belczyk posted it along with sputoppm, spctoppm, pi1toppm, and pi1toppm — all programs for dealing with Atari image formats — to comp.sources.misc on July 15, 1990. For reasons that have been lost to history (literally, the reasons are gone, they did not survive, RIP 🪦), all of these entered the Netpbm (then Pbmplus) distribution except ppmtospu. It got left at the party. 🙈

Then: Georges Kesseler wondered In March 2012 why there was no counterpart to sputoppm in Netpbm, and searched the web, finding only one reference to ppmtopsu: the 1990 comp.sources.misc posting, including the source code. (Yes, it says ppmtopsu there — that's how the original says it, I am not touching it, character for character, periodt. 💅) He emailed the Netpbm maintainer suggesting it be added. King behavior. 👑

Bryan Henderson found the source code to be extremely primitive, not even using common library code. So Bryan completely recoded it, but retained nearly all of the original logic. Glow-up, but the soul stayed the same. 🦋

✨ 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/ppmtospu.html

And that's a wrap, bestie!! This was netpbm documentation, dated 08 March 2012, and honestly? A 2012 date with 1990 lore is the most Aquarius thing I've ever seen. Go force your image to 320x200 and slay. 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅🫶😭🔥👑🌈⭐💀🙈🍓🧚💜

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