The widget set is normaly called the Athena Widget set and that explains the aw. If you need to do generation or pasteup of lossless images under script control, they will help a lot. As this package existed before UniSys's lawyeritis attack of New Years' Day 1995, it is grandfathered in under their license terms and you do not have to pay fees for using it. While XPM is not an X Consortium standard, it is already a de facto standard. It is used in many applications both commercial and non-commercial.
Several vendors distribute the XPM library, as contributed software, on the platforms they sell.
Moreover, the Common Desktop Environment specifies that icons must be stored either in XBM or XPM format. ImageMagick is an X11 package for display and interactive manipulation of images. The package includes tools for image conversion, annotation, compositing, animation, and creating montages. Display is a machine architecture independent image and display program. It can display an image on any workstation display running an X server.