ppmquantall

ppmquantall - run ppmquant on a bunch of files all at once, so they share a common colormap

ppmquantall ncolors ppmfile ...

Takes a bunch of portable pixmap as input. Chooses ncolors colors to best represent all of the images, maps the existing colors to the new ones, and overwrites the input files with the new quantized versions.

Verbose explanation: Let’s say you’ve got a dozen pixmaps that you want to display on the screen all at the same time. Your screen can only display 256 different colors, but the pixmaps have a total of a thousand or so different colors. For a single pixmap you solve this problem with ppmquant; this script solves it for multiple pixmaps. All it does is concatenate them together into one big pixmap, run ppmquant on that, and then split it up into little pixmaps again.

(Note that another way to solve this problem is to pre-select a set of colors and then use ppmquant’s -map option to separately quantize each pixmap to that set.)

ppmquant(1), ppm(5)

It’s a csh script. Csh scripts are not portable to System V. Scripts in general are not portable to non-Unix environments.

Copyright (C) 1991 by Jef Poskanzer.