\
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.TH "Pbmtoascii User Manual" 1 "02 April 2010" "netpbm documentation"

.SH NAME
pbmtoascii - convert a PBM image to ASCII graphics

.UN synopsis
.SH SYNOPSIS

\fBpbmtoascii\fP

[\fB-1x2\fP|\fB-2x4\fP]

[\fIpbmfile\fP]

.UN description
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
This program is part of
.BR "Netpbm" (1)\c
\&.
.PP
\fBpbmtoascii\fP reads a PBM image as input and produces a somewhat
crude ASCII graphic image as output.
.PP
To convert back, use
.BR "asciitopgm" (1)\c
\&.
.PP
\fBppmtoterm\fP does a similar thing for color images to be displayed
on color text terminals.


.UN options
.SH OPTIONS
.PP
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably \fB-quiet\fP, see 
.UR index.html#commonoptions
 Common Options
.UE
\&), \fBpbmtoascii\fP recognizes the following
command line options:
.PP
The \fB-1x2\fP and \fB-2x4\fP options give you two alternate ways for the
pixels to get mapped to characters.  With \fB1x2\fP, the default, each
character represents a group of 1 pixel across by 2 pixels down.  With
\fB-2x4\fP, each character represents 2 pixels across by 4 pixels down.  With
the 1x2 mode you can see the individual pixels, so it's useful for previewing
small images on a non-graphics terminal.  The 2x4 mode lets you display larger
images on a small display, but it obscures pixel-level details.  2x4 mode is
also good for displaying PGM images:

.nf
pamscale -width 158 | pnmnorm | pamditherbw -threshold | pbmtoascii -2x4

.fi

should give good results.

.UN seealso
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR "asciitopgm" (1)\c
\&
.BR "ppmtoascii" (1)\c
\&
.BR "ppmtoterm" (1)\c
\&
.BR "pbm" (1)\c
\&

.UN author
.SH AUTHOR

Copyright (C) 1988, 1992 by Jef Poskanzer.
.SH DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
source.  The master documentation is at
.IP
.B http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtoascii.html
.PP