All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. You may use two hyphens instead of one to designate an option. You may use either white space or equals signs between an option name and its value.
This program is part of Netpbm.
pbmtomacp reads a PBM image as input and produces a MacPaint file as output.
If you do not specify pbmfile, pbmtomacp uses Standard Input.
The generated file is only the data fork of a picture. You will need a program such as mcvert to generate a Macbinary or a BinHex file that contains the necessary information to identify the file as a PNTG file to MacOS.
The only value of this option is testing and experimentation. The option causes every output image to contain exactly 53072 bytes, which is the theoretical maximum size for a MacPaint image.
Without -norle, MacPaint compresses the image as much as possible and the output size depends on the nature of the input.
These options exist for backward compatibility with an unfortunate original design. They do the same thing that you can do in a more Netpbm-like way and more flexibly by processing the input through pamcut.
pbmtomacp was added to Netpbm in 1988, written by Douwe van der Schaaf (...!mcvax!uvapsy!vdschaaf).
In 2015, Akira Urushibata ("Douso") replaced the program with the current version, using different logic and none of the original code. The new version used the "packed PBM" facilities of the Netpbm library and the shhopt method of command line parsing.