DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / netpbm / ppmwheel.1.en
Ppmwheel User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Ppmwheel User Manual(1)

ppmwheel - make a PPM image of a color wheel

ppmwheel diameter [{-huevalue | -huesaturation}] [-maxval=N]

This program is part of Netpbm(1).

ppmwheel produces a PPM image of a color wheel of the specified diameter inside a white square just large enough to hold it.

The color wheel is based on the HSV color model. Hues are distributed
angularly around the circle and the values and saturations are distributed
radially.

You can generate three kinds of color wheel:

  • Hue-value: Select this with a -huevalue option.

    The saturation is 100% everywhere. The value goes from zero to 100%
    linearly, from the center of the wheel to the edge. So the center is black.

    Hence, the image consists of all of the secondary colors based on the
    red, green, and blue primary colors. A secondary color is one that is
    composed of light of at most two of the three primary colors.

  • Hue-saturation: Select this with a -huesaturation option.

    The value is 100% everywhere. The saturation goes from zero to 100%
    linearly, from the center of the wheel to the edge. So the center is white.

  • Ppmcirc: Select this by not specifying any other wheel type option.

    The saturation is 100% everywhere. The value is a strange function of
    the distance from the center, increasing as the square root of the distance
    until halfway out, then decreasing as the 8th root of the distance the rest
    of the way. We don't know what the point of this is, but it is what the
    program Ppmcirc by Peter Kirchgessner in 1995 does, and was the only option
    in ppmwheel from its inception in 2003 to 2019.

You must specify one non-option argument: the radius of the color wheel in pixels.

This is also the height and width of the output image.

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

This selects a hue-value color wheel.

This option was new in Netpbm 10.86 (March 2019).

This selects a hue-saturation color wheel.

This option was new in Netpbm 10.86 (March 2019).

This selects the maxval for the image. The default is 255.

This option was new in Netpbm 10.86 (March 2019).

ppmcie(1), ppmrainbow(1), ppm(1)

ppmwheel was added to Netpbm in Release 10.14 (March 2003).

Copyright (C) 1995 by Peter Kirchgessner

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

http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppmwheel.html
03 February 2019 netpbm documentation