Convert PPM to VIPS

The Portable Pixmap (PPM) file extension, an image format within the Netpbm family, stores simple, uncompressed images. Introduced in the late 1980s, PPM supports RGB color and grayscale images, making it suitable for basic image processing and conversion tasks. Its plain text encoding simplifies debugging and data manipulation, although its lack of compression results in larger file sizes compared to modern formats. As such, PPM finds limited use in contemporary applications, mainly in educational and experimental settings where ease of implementation and readability are prioritized.

The VIPS (Virtual Image Processing System) file format, developed by the libvips library, is designed for high-performance image processing with low memory usage. It supports arbitrary metadata and is optimized for command-line operations. Although not widely supported by other programs, it serves as an efficient intermediate format for tasks like image inversion and gamma correction. The format includes a 64-byte header with basic fields such as image width and a set of band-interleaved scanlines for the image data.