.TH rawtopgm 1 "14 September 2000"
.IX rawtopgm
.SH NAME
rawtopgm - convert raw grayscale bytes into a portable graymap
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B rawtopgm
.RB [ "-bpp " [ 1 | 2 ]]
.RB [ -littleendian ]
.RB [ -maxval
.IR N ]
.RB [ -headerskip
.IR N ]
.RB [ -rowskip
.IR N ]
.RB [ -tb | -topbottom ]
.RI [ width
.IR height ]
.RI [ imagefile ]

.SH DESCRIPTION
Reads raw grayscale values as input.
.IX "raw grayscale"
Produces a PGM file as output.  The input file is just a sequence of
pure binary numbers, either one or two bytes each, either bigendian or
littleendian, representing gray values.  They may be arranged either
top to bottom, left to right or bottom to top, left to right.  There
may be arbitrary header information at the start of the file (to which
.B rawtopgm
pays no attention at all other than the header's size).

Arguments to 
.B rawtopgm
tell how to interpret the pixels (a function that is served by a header in
a regular graphics format).

The 
.I width
and
.I height
parameters tell the dimensions of the image.  If you omit these parameters,
.B rawtopgm
assumes it is a quadratic image and bases the dimensions on the size of the
input stream.  If this size is not a perfect square, 
.B rawtopgm
fails.

When you don't specify
.I width
and
.IR height ,
.B rawtopgm
reads the entire input stream into storage at once, which may take a
lot of storage.  Otherwise,
.B rawtopgm
ordinarily stores only one row at a time.

If you don't specify 
.IR imagefile ,
or specify 
.BR - ,
the input is from Standard Input.

The PGM output is to Standard Output.



.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B -maxval \fIN
.I N
is the maxval for the gray values in the input, and is also the maxval
of the PGM output image.  The default is the maximum value that can be
represented in the number of bytes used for each sample (i.e. 255 or
65535).
.TP
.B -bpp \fR[\fB1\fR|\fB2\fR]
tells the number of bytes that represent each sample in the input. 
If the value is 
.BR 2 ,
The most significant byte is first in the stream.

The default is 1 byte per sample.

.TP
.B -littleendian
says that the bytes of each input sample are ordered with the least
significant byte first.  Without this option, 
.B rawtopgm
assumes MSB first.  This obviously has no effect when there is only one byte
per sample.

.TP
.B -headerskip \fIN
.B rawtopgm
skips over 
.I N
bytes at the beginning of the stream and reads the image immediately after.
The default is 0.

This is useful when the input is actually some graphics format that has
a descriptive header followed by an ordinary raster, and you don't have
a program that understands the header or you want to ignore the header.

.TP
.B -rowskip \fIN
If there is padding at the ends of the rows, you can skip it with this
option.  Note that rowskip need not be an integer.  Amazingly, I once
had an image with 0.376 bytes of padding per row.  This turned out to
be due to a file-transfer problem, but I was still able to read the
image.

Skipping a fractional byte per row means skipping one byte per multiple
rows.
.TP
.B -bt -bottomfirst
By default, 
.B rawtopgm
assumes the pixels in the input go top to bottom, left to right.
If you specify 
.B -bt
or
.BR -bottomfirst ,
.B rawtopgm
assumes the pixels go bottom to top, left to right.  The Molecular Dynamics
and Leica confocal format, for example, use the latter arrangement.

If you don't specify 
.B -bt
when you should or vice versa, the resulting image is upside down, which 
you can correct with 
.B pnmflip .

This option causes 
.B rawtopgm
to read the entire input stream into storage at once, which may take a
lot of storage.  Ordinarly, 
.B rawtopgm
stores only one row at a time.

For backwards compatibility, 
.B rawtopgm
also accepts 
.B -tb 
and 
.B -topbottom
to mean exactly the same thing.  The reasons these are named backwards is that
the original author thought of it as specifying that the wrong results of 
assuming the data is top to bottom should be corrected by flipping the result
top for bottom.  Today, we think of it as simply specifying the format of the
input data so that there are no wrong results.

.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR pgm (5), 
.BR rawtoppm (1), 
.BR pnmflip (1)

.SH AUTHORS
Copyright (C) 1989 by Jef Poskanzer.
.br
Modified June 1993 by Oliver Trepte, oliver@fysik4.kth.se
.\" Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
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