Giftopnm User Manual(0) Giftopnm User Manual(0)giftopnm - convert a GIF file into a PNM image
SYNOPSISgiftopnm [--alphaout={alpha-filename,-}] [-verbose] [-comments]
[-image={N,all}] [-quitearly] [GIFfile]
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use dou‐
ble hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use
white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from
its value.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
This is a graphics format converter from the GIF format to the PNM
(i.e. PBM, PGM, or PPM) format.
If the image contains only black and maximally bright white, the output
is PBM. If the image contains more than those two colors, but only
grays, the output is PGM. If the image contains other colors, the out‐
put is PPM.
A GIF image contains rectangular pixels. They all have the same
aspect ratio, but may not be square (it's actually quite unusual for
them not to be square, but it could happen). The pixels of a Netpbm
image are always square. Because of the engineering complexity to do
otherwise, giftopnm converts a GIF image to a Netpbm image pixel-for-
pixel. This means if the GIF pixels are not square, the Netpbm output
image has the wrong aspect ratio. In this case, giftopnm issues an
informational message telling you to run pamscale to correct the out‐
put.
OPTIONS
--alphaout=alpha-filename
giftopnm creates a PGM (portable graymap) file containing the
alpha channel values in the input image. If the input image
doesn't contain an alpha channel, the alpha-filename file con‐
tains all zero (transparent) alpha values. If you don't specify
--alphaout, giftopnm does not generate an alpha file, and if the
input image has an alpha channel, giftopnm simply discards it.
If you specify - as the filename, giftopnm writes the alpha out‐
put to Standard Output and discards the image.
See pamcomp(1)foronewaytouse the alpha output file.
-verbose
Produce verbose output about the GIF file input.
-comments
Only output GIF89 comment fields.
-image={N,all}
This option identifies which image from the GIF stream you want.
You can select either one image or all the images. Select al
the images with all. Select one image by specifying its
sequence number in the stream: 1, 2, 3, etc.
The default is just Image 1.
A GIF stream normally contains only one image, so you don't need
this option. But some streams, including animated GIFs, have
multiple images.
When you select multiple GIF images, the output is a PNM stream
with multiple images.
If you specify a single image, giftopnm must read and partially
validate the images before that in the stream. It may or may
not do the same for the images after it; see -quitearly.
The all value was added in Netpbm 10.16 (June 2003). Earlier
giftopnm can extract only one image.
-quitearly
This options makes giftopnm stop reading its input file as soon
as it has converted and output the images from the input that
you requested. By default, giftopnm reads until the end of the
GIF stream, ignoring any data after the images you requested.
Two reasons not to use this option:
· The input file is a pipe and the process that is filling that
pipe expects the pipe to take the entire stream and will fail or
get stuck if it doesn't.
· You want to validate the entire GIF stream.
Two reasons to use this option:
· It saves the time and other resources to read the end of the
stream.
· There are errors in the end of the stream that make giftopnm
fail.
This option has no effect if you also specify -image=all
This option was new in Netpbm 10.35 (August 2006). Before that,
giftopnm always reads the entire stream.
RESTRICTIONS
This does not correctly handle the Plain Text Extension of the GIF89
standard, since I did not have any example input files containing them.
SEE ALSOppmtogif(1), ppmcolormask(1), pamcomp(1), http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle
⟨http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle⟩ , ppm(1).
AUTHOR
Copyright (c) 1993 by David Koblas (koblas@netcom.com)
LICENSE
As a historical note, for a long time if you used giftopnm, you were
using a patent on the LZW compression method which was owned by Unisys,
and in all probability you did not have a license from Unisys to do so.
Unisys typically asked $5000 for a license for trivial use of the
patent. Unisys never enforced the patent against trivial users, and
made statements that it is much less concerned about people using the
patent for decompression (which is what giftopnm does than for compres‐
sion. The patent expired in 2003.
Rumor has it that IBM also owns a patent covering giftopnm.
A replacement for the GIF format that has never required any patent
license to use is the PNG format.
netpbm documentation 6 August 2006 Giftopnm User Manual(0)
