PBMA Files
ASCII Portable Bit Map Graphics Files


PBMA is a data directory which contains examples of the ASCII version of the portable bitmap (PBM) format, a lowest common denominator monochrome (black and white) file format. It was originally designed to make it reasonable to mail bitmaps between different types of machines. Now it serves as the common language of a large family of bitmap conversion filters.

The definition is as follows:

The character '1' means black, '0' means white. Whitespace in the bits section is ignored. Characters from a "#" to the next end-of-line are ignored (comments). No line should be longer than 70 characters.

Example ASCII PBM file:

        P1
        # feep.ascii.pbm
        24 7
        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
        0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0
        0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0
        0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0
        0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
        0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
      

ASCII PBM File Characteristics:

Licensing:

The computer code and data files described and made available on this web page are distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Related Data and Programs:

PBMA_IO, a C++ library which handles the Portable Bit Map (ASCII) format.

PBMB, a data directory which contains examples of PBMB files, binary Portable Bit Map 2D graphics, black and white;

PBMLIB, a C library which reads or writes graphics files in the Portable Bit Map format;

PGMA, a data directory which contains examples of PGMA files, ASCII Portable Gray Map, 2D graphics;

PPMA, a data directory which contains examples of PPMA files, Portable Pixel Map (ASCII) 2D graphics, color;

Reference:

  1. the NETPBM homepage.

Sample Files:

All the filenames here include the extension "ascii.pbm". The "ascii" part just helps me to distinguish these files from their binary versions, and is not required by any program.

You can go up one level to the DATA page.


Last revised on 11 January 2011.