Ever since computers have become approachable, you can witness a noticeable growth in the field of technology and entertainment. One of the most common sources of entertainment is your photos and other media. Although, the current technology doesn’t bother you to choose the correct program to open a specific tool that can support a file. However, it is good to know that the pictures and other media files are not of the same file type and have various extensions associated with it. One of such extensions is PBM file extension that has been gaining popularity among users for a while. Today, we’re going to get a brief introduction on what is PBM file and how to execute it.
What is PBM file?
PBM in stands for Portable Bit Map, which in fact, is not a dedicated file format on its own. The PBM file consists of binary text (1 and 0) in it. This file type is generally used to transmit a file to someone or store it on a system. Although, there is no specific definition to PBM, which makes it non-expressive, but you can understand it as a file that exists in a pipeline between two programs. It is important to know that PBM file is nowhere close to other popular image formats like PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF etc. It is just a text based, black and white image files having binary numbers in them.
How to open a PBM file?
Although, PBM file extension may be related to images and pictures but they cannot be opened through any of such programs like Corel PaintShop, Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape, Netpbm, xCanvas, Pro, XnView, ACD Systems or any other popular graphics and photos applications. Now that PBM files are nothing but a few binary letters, you may open it using any text editor like Notepad or Notepad++.
One of the major issues that you may come across while opening a PBM file is that it doesn’t open in any of the text editor app. The reason for such problem is may be that the file you’re dealing with is not even a PBM file and appears to be one. There are many extensions that you may find likewise to PBM. For example, PBN (Portable Bridge Notation), PBD (EaseUS Todo Backup) file or PBP (PSP Firmware Update). In case if you wish to convert a PBM file to a different format, you may easily do it using a dedicated converting application. Below is an example of a PBM file, where you can see texts in the form of binary codes of 1 and 0.
Overall, the PBM file extension is not more than a simple text file if you open it in a text editor. You can understand PBM file as a common language of bitmap image conversion filters. It must be clear that PBM is not a factor that pays any heed to efficiency. It is simple enough for anyone to develop tools to convert any other graphics format. If you wish to share some tips about PBM files, do let us know in the comments below.