rasterizing digitized contour maps

[Bob Harrington]

I imagine some of you have done this before:

I have a digitized contour map that I want
to turn into a DEM. I rasterized the contours
with v.to.rast, which worked fine, and now want 
to interpolate all the cells between the contours.

I am trying to use r.surf.idw2 to do this,
but I have two questions:

1. Is this the best way to do this? I expect
some strange results using r.surf.idw2, because
for cells near a contour, all the nearest cells
used in the interpolation will have the same
value, so the interpolated cell will just be 
assigned the same value as the nearby contour.

2. I launched r.surf.idw2 yesterday on a SPARC 10,
and it is still working this morning. The map is
834 by 989. How long is this going to take? 

Cheers,

Bob Harrington
Hydrology and Water Resources
University of Arizona