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From: walrus@wam.umd.edu (Udo K Schuermann)
Subject: Re: help with pbmplus
Message-ID: <1991Apr11.220453.20208@wam.umd.edu>
Keywords: pbmplus, format conversion, gif, ilbm
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Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
References: <1991Apr11.153537.4257@cs.UAlberta.CA>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 22:04:53 GMT

In article <1991Apr11.153537.4257@cs.UAlberta.CA> c315-25@cs.UAlberta.CA (Huisman Kenneth M) writes:
>
>From what I understand, you first run giftoppm and then run ppmtoilbm
>correct?
>
>giftoppm filename.gif >filename.ppm
>
>but all it did was create a file called ">filename.ppm" and continue to dump
>all the garbled characters onto the screen.

You almost had it!  The standard AmigaDOS Shell/CLI requires the
i/o redirection to immediately follow the command name (under SKsh
you would have been ok).  Try this:

giftoppm >filename.ppm filename.gif		; GIF --> PPM
ppmquant <filename.ppm >filename2.ppm 32	; reduce 256 to 32 colors
ppmtoilbm <filename2.ppm >filename.iff		; PPM --> ILBM (IFF)

If you're converting a 16 color GIF you can skip the "ppmquant" step.
If "ppmtoilbm" finds more than 32 colors in the PPM file it will write
a HAM file, which may ore may not be what you want.

If you have a shell that handles pipes the way they work under Unix
(SKsh and the ARP shell do), try this:

giftoppm filename.gif | ppmquant 32 | ppmtoilbm >filename.iff

Write yourself a script for often-used conversion to save yourself the
typing!

>the garbled character printing seems to go on 
>forever.  Should I just be more patient?  Does it come out right in the
>end?

The garbled characters are the PPM file!  Try printing a .gif or an .iff
file to the screen.  Same thing.

What PBMPLUS does is convert everything into the PPM format,
manipulate that, and from there convert it to some other format.  The
programs are ports from Unix software and tend to be fairly memory
hungry.  They do a very good job, though!

I hope this clarifies things and is of help to anybody else who is
interested or has problems with the PBMPLUS programs.  Enjoy!

 ._.  Udo Schuermann		We only came for the oil and to test our
 ( )  walrus@wam.umd.edu	weapons.  Thank you very much!

