Portable Arbitrary Map

File Format
Name	Portable Arbitrary Map
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics Portable Arbitrary Map
Extension(s)	.pam
MIME Type(s)	image/x-portable-arbitrarymap
PRONOM	fmt/405
Released	2000

"PAM" redirects here. For the authentication system, see PAM configuration file.

PAM (Portable Arbitrary Map) is one of the native image file formats of the Netpbm software. It is newer than the other Netpbm formats (PBM, PGM, PPM). The main advantages of PAM are that it supports transparency, and that new features can be added to it. The main disadvantage is that it is not as widely supported by third-party software.

Disambiguation

Some sources incorrectly name this format "Portable Any Map". "Portable anymap" is PNM, not PAM.

See also

• Netpbm formats

Identification

Files begin with ASCII characters "P7", followed by a newline (0x0A).

Note that this is a little different from PBM/PGM/PPM format, in which the third byte does not have to be a newline.

Specifications

• PAM Format Specification

Software

• Netpbm
• ImageMagick
• XnView
• FFmpeg
• Deark
• abydos

Sample files

• dexvert samples — image/pam

Links

• Wikipedia: PAM graphics format