ppm(5)
NAME
ppm - portable pixmap file format
DESCRIPTION
The portable pixmap format is a lowest common denominator color image
file format.
It should be noted that this format is egregiously inefficient. It is
highly redundant, while containing a lot of information that the human
eye can't even discern. Furthermore, the format allows very little
information about the image besides basic color, which means you may
have to couple a file in this format with other independent information
to get any decent use out of it. However, it is very easy to write and
analyze programs to process this format, and that is the point.
It should also be noted that files often conform to this format in
every respect except the precise semantics of the sample values. These
files are useful because of the way PPM is used as an intermediary
format. They are informally called PPM files, but to be absolutely
precise, you should indicate the variation from true PPM. For example,
"PPM using the red, green, and blue colors that the scanner in question
uses."
The format definition is as follows.
A PPM file consists of a sequence of one or more PPM images. There are
no data, delimiters, or padding before, after, or between images.
Each PPM image consists of the following:
- A "magic number" for identifying the file type. A ppm image's magic
number is the two characters "P6".
- Whitespace (blanks, TABs, CRs, LFs).
- A width, formatted as ASCII characters in decimal.
- Whitespace.
- A height, again in ASCII decimal.
- Whitespace.
- The maximum color value (Maxval), again in ASCII decimal. Must be
less than 65536.
- Newline or other single whitespace character.
- A raster of Width * Height pixels, proceeding through the image in
normal English reading order. Each pixel is a triplet of red, green,
and blue samples, in that order. Each sample is represented in pure
binary by either 1 or 2 bytes. If the Maxval is less than 256, it is
1 byte. Otherwise, it is 2 bytes. The most significant byte is
first.
- In the raster, the sample values are "nonlinear." They are
proportional to the intensity of the CIE Rec. 709 red, green, and
blue in the pixel, adjusted by the CIE Rec. 709 gamma transfer
function. (That transfer function specifies a gamma number of 2.2
and has a linear section for small intensities). A value of Maxval
for all three samples represents CIE D65 white and the most intense
color in the color universe of which the image is part (the color
universe is all the colors in all images to which this image might be
compared).
- Note that a common variation on the PPM format is to have the sample
values be "linear," i.e. as specified above except without the gamma
adjustment. pnmgamma takes such a PPM variant as input and produces
a true PPM as output.
- Characters from a "#" to the next end-of-line, before the maxval
line, are comments and are ignored.
Note that you can use pnmdepth to convert between a the format with 1
byte per sample and the one with 2 bytes per sample.
There is actually another version of the PPM format that is fairly
rare: "plain" PPM format. The format above, which generally considered
the normal one, is known as the "raw" PPM format. See pbm(5) for some
commentary on how plain and raw formats relate to one another.
The difference in the plain format is:
- There is exactly one image in a file.
- The magic number is P3 instead of P6.
- Each sample in the raster is represented as an ASCII decimal number
(of arbitrary size).
- Each sample in the raster has white space before and after it. There
must be at least one character of white space between any two
samples, but there is no maximum. There is no particular separation
of one pixel from another -- just the required separation between the
blue sample of one pixel from the red sample of the next pixel.
- No line should be longer than 70 characters.
Here is an example of a small pixmap in this format:
P3
# feep.ppm
4 4
15
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 0 15
0 0 0 0 15 7 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 7 0 0 0
15 0 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Programs that read this format should be as lenient as possible,
accepting anything that looks remotely like a pixmap.
COMPATIBILITY
Before April 2000, a raw format PPM file could not have a maxval greater than 255. Hence, it could not have more than one byte per sample. Old programs may depend on this. Before July 2000, there could be at most one image in a PPM file. As a result, most tools to process PPM files ignore (and don't read) any data after the first image.
SEE ALSO
giftopnm(1), gouldtoppm(1), ilbmtoppm(1), imgtoppm(1), mtvtoppm(1), pcxtoppm(1), pgmtoppm(1), pi1toppm(1), picttoppm(1), pjtoppm(1), qrttoppm(1), rawtoppm(1), rgb3toppm(1), sldtoppm(1), spctoppm(1), sputoppm(1), tgatoppm(1), ximtoppm(1), xpmtoppm(1), yuvtoppm(1), ppmtoacad(1), ppmtogif(1), ppmtoicr(1), ppmtoilbm(1), ppmtopcx(1), ppmtopgm(1), ppmtopi1(1), ppmtopict(1), ppmtopj(1), ppmtopuzz(1), ppmtorgb3(1), ppmtosixel(1), ppmtotga(1), ppmtouil(1), ppmtoxpm(1), ppmtoyuv(1), ppmdither(1), ppmforge(1), ppmhist(1), ppmmake(1), ppmpat(1), ppmquant(1), ppmquantall(1), ppmrelief(1), pnm(5), pgm(5), pbm(5)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.
08 April 2000 ppm(5)
Opportunity
Personal Opportunity - Free software gives you access to billions of dollars of software at no cost. Use this software for your business, personal use or to develop a profitable skill. Access to source code provides access to a level of capabilities/information that companies protect though copyrights. Open source is a core component of the Internet and it is available to you. Leverage the billions of dollars in resources and capabilities to build a career, establish a business or change the world. The potential is endless for those who understand the opportunity.
Business Opportunity - Goldman Sachs, IBM and countless large corporations are leveraging open source to reduce costs, develop products and increase their bottom lines. Learn what these companies know about open source and how open source can give you the advantage.
Free Software
Free Software provides computer programs and capabilities at no cost but more importantly, it provides the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. The importance of free software is a matter of access, not price. Software at no cost is a benefit but ownership rights to the software and source code is far more significant.
Free Office Software - The Libre Office suite provides top desktop productivity tools for free. This includes, a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation engine, drawing and flowcharting, database and math applications. Libre Office is available for Linux or Windows.
Free Books
The Free Books Library is a collection of thousands of the most popular public domain books in an online readable format. The collection includes great classical literature and more recent works where the U.S. copyright has expired. These books are yours to read and use without restrictions.
Source Code - Want to change a program or know how it works? Open Source provides the source code for its programs so that anyone can use, modify or learn how to write those programs themselves. Visit the GNU source code repositories to download the source.
Education
Study at Harvard, Stanford or MIT - Open edX provides free online courses from Harvard, MIT, Columbia, UC Berkeley and other top Universities. Hundreds of courses for almost all major subjects and course levels. Open edx also offers some paid courses and selected certifications.
Linux Manual Pages - A man or manual page is a form of software documentation found on Linux/Unix operating systems. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts.
