NAME

       pnm - Netpbm superformat

DESCRIPTION

       The  PNM  format  is  just  an  abstraction of the PBM, PGM, and PPM formats.  I.e. the name "PNM" refers
       collectively to PBM, PGM, and PPM.

       The name "PNM" is an acronym derived from "Portable Any Map." This derivation makes  more  sense  if  you
       consider it in the context of the other Netpbm format names: PBM, PGM, and PPM.

       The more general term "Netpbm format" refers to the PNM formats plus PAM.

       PNM is principally used with Netpbm(1).

       Note  that  besides  being  names of formats, PBM, PGM, PPM, and PNM are also classes of programs.  A PNM
       program can take PBM, PGM, or PPM input.  That's nothing special -- a PPM program can  too.   But  a  PNM
       program  can  often  produce  multiple  output  formats as well, and a PNM program can see the difference
       between PBM, PGM, and PPM input and respond to each differently whereas a PPM program sees everything  as
       if it were PPM.  This is discussed more in the description of the netpbm programs" (1).

       "pnm" also appears in the names of the most general Netpbm library routines(1), some of which aren't even
       related to the PNM format.

INTERNET MEDIA TYPE

       No Internet Media Type (aka MIME type, content type) for PNM has been registered with the IANA,  but  the
       value image/x-portable-anymap is conventional.

       Note  that  there  are  also  conventional  Internet  Media  Types  for  each of the PNM subformats.  The
       recommended practice is to use those in preference to the PNM code when it is convenient to do so.

FILE NAME

       There are no requirements on the name of a PNM file, but the convention  is  to  use  the  suffix  "pbm",
       "pgm",  or  "ppm", depending on the particular subformat, or "pnm" if it is not convenient to distinguish
       the subformats.

SEE ALSO

       ppm(1), pgm(1), pbm(1), pam(1), programs that process PNM(1), libnetpbm(1)

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/pnm.html