pbmpage - Man Page

• Generate a test pattern for printing onto US standard paper: pbmpage > path/to/file.pbm
• Generate a test pattern for printing onto A4 paper: pbmpage -a4 > path/to/file.pbm
• Specify the pattern to use: pbmpage 1|2|3 > path/to/file.pbm

tldr.sh

pbmpage [-a4] test_pattern

This program is part of Netpbm(1).

pbmpage generates a one page test pattern to print on a sheet of paper, for use in calibrating a printer.  The test pattern in is PBM format.

pbmpage produces an image intended for 600 dots per inch printer resolution.

If you are printing on an HP PPA printer, you can convert the output of this program to a stream that you can feed to the printer with pbmtoppa.

Bear in mind that when you print the test pattern, you are testing not only the printer, but any converter or driver software along the printing path.  Any one of these components may adjust margins, crop the image, erase edges, and such.

If, because of addition of margins, the printer refuses to print the image because it is too big, use pamcut to cut the right and bottom edges off the test pattern until it is small enough to print.

test_pattern is the number of the test pattern to generate, as follows.  The default is 1.

1. A black on white grid ruled in numbers of pixels.  A black one pixel box is at the very edges of the paper.

   Before Netpbm 10.18 (August 2003), the perimeter box was not there.

2. A vertical line segment, one pixel wide, extending 1/2" up from the exact center of the page.
3. Two diagonal line segments, one starting at the upper left corner of the page, the other starting from the lower right corner of the page.  Both extend 1/2" toward the center of the page at 45 degrees.

In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options ), pbmpage recognizes the following command line option:

-a4

Generate an image for A4 (European) paper.  Without this option, pbmpage generates an image for US standard paper (8 1/2" wide x 11" high).

pbmtoppa(1), pamcut(1), pbm(1)

Tim Norman.  Copyright (C) 1998.  Licensed under GNU Public License

Manual page by Bryan Henderson, May 2000.  Contributed to the public domain by its author.

This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source.  The master documentation is at

http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmpage.html

pbmtoppa(1).