Greetings Paolo,

	Bologna, eh?  Oldest university in Europe?  Well, as for GRASS, I think
it will not do a lot of what you want.  It certainly will NOT do optical 
character recognition (OCR).  No GIS will.  You need separate software for that,
and I think that it may not be worth the trouble.  Grass will vectorise scanned
maps, but it is not very good at it.  It sounds like you want a quick way to
get some maps into digital form, with all the usual attributes included, e.g.
names, feature separation(e.g. roads, rivers, boundaries, etc.) and there is no
simple way to do this.  If money is a problem you may want to use GRASS to ana-
lyse your data once you convert it, but you have to look into other options for
doing that, regardless of the GIS you use.

Ciao,
Gary

garyo@hydroqual.com
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No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.

			William Shakespeare
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