This program is part of Netpbm.
The PBM format is a lowest common denominator monochrome file format. It serves as the common language of a large family of bitmap image conversion filters. Because the format pays no heed to efficiency, it is simple and general enough that one can easily develop programs to convert to and from just about any other graphics format, or to manipulate the image.
The name "PBM" is an acronym derived from "Portable Bit Map."
This is not a format that one would normally use to store a file or to transmit it to someone -- it's too expensive and not expressive enough for that. It's just an intermediary format. In it's purest use, it lives only in a pipe between two other programs.
The format definition is as follows.
A PBM file consists of a sequence of one or more PBM images. There are no data, delimiters, or padding before, after, or between images.
Each PBM image consists of the following:
A row of an image is horizontal. A column is vertical. The pixels in the image are square and contiguous.
There is actually another version of the PBM format, even more more simplistic, more lavishly wasteful of space than PBM, called Plain PBM. Plain PBM actually came first, but even its inventor couldn't stand its recklessly squanderous use of resources after a while and switched to what we now know as the regular PBM format. But Plain PBM is so redundant -- so overstated -- that it's virtually impossible to break. You can send it through the most liberal mail system (which was the original purpose of the PBM format) and it will arrive still readable. You can flip a dozen random bits and easily piece back together the original image. And we hardly need to define the format here, because you can decode it by inspection.
The difference is:
Here is an example of a small image in the plain PBM format.
P1 # feep.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
There is a newline character at the end of each of these lines.
You can generate the Plain PBM format from the regular PBM format (first image in the file only) with the pnmtoplainpnm program.
Programs that read this format should be as lenient as possible, accepting anything that looks remotely like a bitmap.
Before July 2000, there could be at most one image in a PBM file. As a result, most tools to process PBM files ignore (and don't read) any data after the first image.