ppmtoicr - convert a portable pixmap into NCSA ICR format

ppmtoicr [-windowname name] [-expand expand] [-display display] [-rle] [ppmfile]

Reads a portable pixmap file as input. Produces an NCSA Telnet Interactive Color Raster graphic file as output. If ppmfile is not supplied, ppmtoicr will read from standard input.

Interactive Color Raster (ICR) is a protocol for displaying raster graphics on workstation screens. The protocol is implemented in NCSA Telnet for the Macintosh version 2.3. The ICR protocol shares characteristics of the Tektronix graphics terminal emulation protocol. For example, escape sequences are used to control the display.

ppmtoicr will output the appropriate sequences to create a window of the dimensions of the input pixmap, create a colormap of up to 256 colors on the display, then load the picture data into the window.

Note that there is no icrtoppm tool - this transformation is one way.

-windownamename

Output will be displayed in name (Default is to use ppmfile or "untitled" if standard input is read.)

-expandexpand

Output will be expanded on display by factor expand (For example, a value of 2 will cause four pixels to be displayed for every input pixel.)

-displaydisplay

Output will be displayed on screen numbered display

-rle

Use run-length encoded format for display. (This will nearly always result in a quicker display, but may skew the colormap.)

To display a ppm file using the protocol:

    ppmtoicr ppmfile

    ppmtoicr ppmfile > filename
    cat filename

    giftopnm giffile | ppmtoicr -w giffile -r -e 2

The protocol uses frequent fflush calls to speed up display. If the output is saved to a file for later display via cat, drawing will be much slower. In either case, increasing the Blocksize limit on the display will speed up transmission substantially.

ppm(5)

NCSA Telnet for the Macintosh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1989)

Copyright (C) 1990 by Kanthan Pillay (svpillay@Princeton.EDU), Princeton University Computing and Information Technology.