Subject: "Re: Portable Bitmap Toolkit?"

From: "Selden E. Ball, Jr." <SEB at LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 1994 16:21:15 -0400 (EDT)

John,

You asked
>The FAQ mentions fits conversion to other formats usinf portbale bitmap
>toolkit. Can anyone tell me about this?

The "portable bitmap toolkit" known as PBMPlus is included in 
the "contributed" portion of X11R5.  
PBMPlus was developed by Jef Poskanzer with help by many others.
Unfortunately, Jef no longer has time to work on it. 

PBMPlus has been extended by others (not me) to become NetPBM.
I'm appending the announcement.

I hope this helps.

Selden
seb at lns62.lns.cornell.edu
================================================================
                           N E T P B M
                     Release 1 March 1994

Netpbm is a toolkit for conversion of images between a variety of
different formats, as well as to allow a few basic image operations.
The package is intended to be portable to many platforms. It has been
tested under UNIX (BSD and SYSV, e.g. SGI, Sun4, Sun386i, DEC and
Apollo DN 3500), VMS and AmigaDOS. There are also compiler directives
in it for MS-DOS.

You'll find the latest release of Netpbm at the following sites:
* wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.135.4),
  directory /graphics/graphics/packages/NetPBM
* ikaros.fysik4.kth.se (130.237.35.2), directory /pub/netpbm.
* ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (134.106.1.9). This site also carries
  binaries for the Amiga.
* peipa.essex.ac.uk (155.245.115.161), directory ipa/src/manip
* ftp.rahul.net (192.160.13.1), directory /pub/davidsen/source
* ftp.cs.ubc.ca, directory /ftp/archive/netpbm
* ftp.x.org, directory /contrib

You'll also find a mirror site at the BBS:
* sixhub.tmr.com in the "source" area.

Netpbm is based on the widely spread Pbmplus package (release: 10 Dec 91).
On top of that, a lot of improvements and additions have been made. After
the latest release of Pbmplus, a lot of additional filters have been
circulating on the net. The aim of Netpbm was, to collect these and to turn
them into a package. This work has been performed by a group of program-
mers all over the world. If *you* have some code to add, please contact us,
and we will incorporate it. There is a mailing list for discussions about
Netpbm. You post a message to the list by writing to "netpbm at fysik4.kth.se".
If you want to be on the list, please contact the list administrator,
"oliver at fysik4.kth.se".

Please note, that this is not an official Pbmplus release. The code in
this release is merely a collection of code from various sources around
the world. Not all of the new code parts follow the high standard of
programming of Pbmplus. We have tried to make the code portable to as
many systems as possible, but we haven't cleaned up all routines. We hope
that this release will help the many users of Pbmplus to upgrade their
code all in one piece, instead of having to hunt down different code
fragments at different sites around the world. We also hope, that our
effort will help the author of Pbmplus, Jef Poskanzer, to make a new
official release soon.