NAME

       asciitopgm - convert ASCII graphics into a PGM

SYNOPSIS

       asciitopgm [-d divisor] height width [asciifile]

DESCRIPTION

       This program is part of Netpbm(1).

       asciitopgm  reads ASCII data as input and produces a PGM image with pixel values which are
       an approximation of the "brightness" of  the  ASCII  characters,  assuming  black-on-white
       printing.   In  other words, a capital M is very dark, a period is very light, and a space
       is white.

       Obviously, asciitopgm assumes a  certain  font  in  assigning  a  brightness  value  to  a
       character.

       asciitopgm  considers  ASCII  control  characters  to  be  all  white.   For  a lower case
       character, It assigns a special brightnesses which has nothing to do with  what  it  looks
       like  printed.   asciitopgm  takes  the ASCII character code from the lower 7 bits of each
       input byte.  But it warns you if the most significant bit of any input byte is not zero.

       The output image is height pixels high by width pixels wide, truncating and  padding  with
       white on the right and bottom as necessary.

       The  divisor value is an integer (decimal) by which the blackness of an input character is
       divided.  You can use this to adjust the brightness of the output:  for  example,  if  the
       image is too bright, increase the divisor.

       In  a  sort  of reminiscence of Fortran line printer carriage control, where a line starts
       with + (plus), asciitopgm  combines  it  with  the  previous  row  of  output  instead  of
       generating  a  new  row.  This allows a larger range of gray values.  (In Fortran carriage
       control, the first character of every line sent to the printer tells how much  to  advance
       the  paper,  with  +  meaning  not  at all, so that the rest of the characters on the line
       overstrike the ones already on the paper.  What asciitopgm does  is  rather  different  in
       that asciitopgm does not reserve the first character of every line that way.  If the first
       character is anything but +, asciitopgm considers it just to be  first  character  of  the
       image.

       If you're looking for something that creates an image of text, with that text specified in
       ASCII, that is something quite different.  Use pbmtext for that.

OPTIONS

       In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet,
       see
        Common  Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), asciitopgm recognizes the following command
       line option:

       -d divisor
              Specify the value by which the blackness of an input character is divided.  This is
              an integer value.  Default value is 1.  Larger values produce darker output images.

SEE ALSO

       pbmtoascii(1), pbmtext(1), pgm(1)

AUTHOR

       Wilson H. Bent. Jr. (whb@usc.edu)

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/asciitopgm.html