Arc/Info dxf to Grass

[Ron Howard - x4350]

Comrades,

I sent this message earlier this week and nothing happened. Maybe I flubbed it.
Anyway...

First of all, I would like to sincerely thank all of you who offered solutions
to my conversion pains. Yuri, Scott, Malcolm, Olga, and Michael, you're all
responsible for saving me a great deal of time! I've got vectors, dlg's and
attribute text all successfully from Arc/Info. But one thing still escapes me:

I'm at a natural gas utility company. We have four layers in our Arc/Info
coverages. Two of which are our most significant - our gas pipes and the
geo (streets, housing lots etc..). Both coverages are line and therefore
contain no polygons.

Those two coverages contain "free standing text" which is annotation that we
use to "decorate" our pipeline network with various types of notation. We also
use INFO to store data about the arcs (pipes) but this data is not associated
with the free standing text that is painted on the coverages.

The reason I chose arcdxf is because it picks up the free standing text. I've
successfully loaded output from arcdxf into AutoCad and all of the text were
there. If I could only do the same with Grass. I would like to see v.in.dxf
work this way. Now it just takes the free standing text and makes a box
(vector) out of it (as far as I know).

Perhaps there's an available tool on contrib or something that I could use.
Anybody? ping...ping...ping...

Ron Howard
Northwest Natural Gas
220 N.W. 2nd Ave
Portland Oregon 97219          rlh at gasco.com  (503)226-4211 ext. 4350