pamtowinicon(1) - phpMan

Pamtowinicon User Manual(0) Pamtowinicon User Manual(0)

NAME
pamtowinicon - convert Netpbm PAM images to a Microsoft Windows icon file

SYNOPSIS
pamtowinicon [-pngthreshold=threshold] [-truetransparent] [-verbose] [pam_file]

All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. You may use two hyphens
instead of one to designate an option. You may use either white space or equals signs
between an option name and its value.

DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).

pamtowinicon reads an RGB_ALPHA Netpbm PAM file and converts it to a Microsoft Windows
icon file.

The output goes to Standard Output.

The input is a multi-image PAM file; each image becomes an icon in the output file. If
you have input images in multiple files, you can simply combine them with cat and pass the
result to pamtowinicon.

OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet,
see Common Options <index.html#commonoptions> ), pamtowinicon recognizes the following
command line options:

-pngthreshold=threshold
pamtowinicon encodes images with resolutions above or equal threshold by threshold
as PNG by running pnmtopng(1). Other images it encodes using the more traditional
BMP format.

When the program uses PNG encoding for a 5-channel PAM with separate AND mask (see
below), it discards the AND mask.

The default value for threshold is 128.

-truetransparent
Make all pixels outside the opaque area black, avoiding inversion and other effects
on the background of the image (see Windows Icons(1)).

-verbose
Print more messages

IMAGES
pamtowinicon reads a (multi-image) Netpbm PAM file as input and outputs an single Windows
icon file containing those images.

The images in the icon file are in the same order as in the PAM input.

PAM Input
pamtowinicon interprets the PAM images as follows, based on the number of channels.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
channels image
1 fully opaque grayscale image
2 grayscale image with transparency channel
3 fully opaque color image
4 color image with transparency channel
5 color image with transparency channel and additional AND
mask

The tuple types of the PAMs are irrelevant.

AND Mask
The so-called "AND mask" is a special feature of Microsoft Windows icons. It is required
for all BMP encoded images. At the first sight, the AND mask is a 1-bit transparency
channel, but it is also used for e.g. shading the icon while dragging. See Windows
Icons(1) for details.

If there is no explicit AND mask, but transparency data in the input image, pamtowinicon
sets the AND mask to opaque where the sample in the transparency channel is below maxval,
and to transparent elsewhere.

If no transparency data is present in the input image, pamtowinicon assumes the whole
image to be fully opaque.

BMP Output
When BMP encoding an image, pamtowinicon tries to use the most compact BI_RGB format
allowed for icon images with a color depth of eight bits per channel.

pamtowinicon generates neither 16-bit BI_RGB nor BI_BITFIELDS BMP encoded images, even if
the maxval of the input PAM is not 255.