[GRASSLIST:677] Creating surface colours

[Kurt Springs]

Hi folks

First off, this is what I have:

A couple of sets of DXF files with map data created by the Ordinance Survey
of Ireland.  Each tile has two DXF files.  One with the contours, the other
with the water items (Lakes, rivers, steams, etc.)  The DXF contour files
(MAP#_C.DXF where # is the number of the tile) have a number of layers.  For
the sake of the question I will use MAP8
MAP8_C.CLIPFRAME is a simple boarder around the map.
MAP8_C.CONTOUR_10, MAP8_C.CONTOUR_20, and MAP8_C.CONTOUR_50 contain the
contour lines.
MAP8_C.SP_HT_50 contains the spot heights (random elevations not on the
contour lines.).
MAP8_C.CON_TXT_50 contains the labels for all of the above.
The contour lines are set up differently than I would have expected.
MAP8_C.CONTOUR_10 has the contour lines for 10m, 30m, 70m, 90m, 100m . . .
MAP8_C.CONTOUR_20 has the contour lines for 20m, 40m, 60m, 80m, 120m . . .
200m)
And MAP8_C.CONTOUR_50 has the contour lines for 50, 150, 250 etc.

I've run v.in.dxf to get those layers into vector format.  Then I ran
v.patch to combine them, v.llabel to attach the labels, and finally
v.support.  All that seems to have run smoothly.

Now I need to create a raster surface with colours.  I was thinking 0 - 100
as green, 100 - 200 yellow, 200 - 300 orange, 300 - 400 red, and 400 -  as
brown.  Though I would prefer something similar to what the OSi uses in the
Discovery maps:  green to light green to yellow to light brown to dark
brown.

H. Bowman tried to help me, but I think that the OSi set the DXF files up in
a manner that he did not expect.  He had me run v.to.sites on the the spot
heights, but there were no labels to go further and v.to.sites said that
there were no sites in MAP8_C.CON_TXT_50 file.

I tried using v.to.rst on the combined map I created, but I wasn't sure how
to use r.colors.  I tried looking it up in the Neteler book and in the
Grass5raster.pdf, but found the explanations somewhat hard to follow, at
least for my purposes.

I was considering using Adobe Illustrator to create a .tiff file with the
colours at the various levels and converting with r.in.tiff, but the maps
are huge (20km x 20km) and I think this method would consume a lot of time.

Also, I am not sure if the vector map converted to a raster properly.  When
I ran d.rast the monitor did not sure the contours and continuous lines.

Is there a simple solution to creating the surface raster map with colours
(either the ones I want or the basic ones).

Thanks for whatever advice you can offer.

Kurt