Unable to get aview to produce an image

Question

I have installed aview the ASCII art image viewer with:

sudo apt-get install aview

But now when I run it with:

aview /path/to/image.extension

I get this:

Invalid magic-not p?m family format

I have tried getting this to work with the following image formats so far, and still the same output: png, jpg, and bmp.

Why is this happening? And how do I fix this, or use aview correctly if I am using it wrong?

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OS Information:

Description:    Ubuntu 14.10
Release:    14.10

Package Information:

aview:
  Installed: 1.3.0rc1-9
  Candidate: 1.3.0rc1-9
  Version table:
 *** 1.3.0rc1-9 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ utopic/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Answer 1

EDIT: apparently if you invoke the program as asciiview instead of aview, it will automagically do the file conversion for you

asciiview somefile.png

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Original answer:

The p?m refers to the libpnm family of "lowest common denominator" image files, including pbm and pgm. If you convert your image to one of those formats, for example using the convert tool from the imagemagick package

convert somefile.png somefile.pgm

(or using gimp if you prefer) it should work, e.g.

aview somefile.pgm

Answer 2

I typically use pnm with aview. You can convert to pnm with Gimp also.