[GRASSLIST:3126] New grass user. Please help free me from Caris!

[josh]

Hello all. I am working on a project to digitize nautical charts for use
in navigation software. We are currently using CarisGIS on Windows. It
has been a major headache. The most important function that I need grass
to accomplish would be line-following. Sort of like vtrace in Arc. This
is the part that Caris does well (except in the new version, which we
just upgraded to and makes our systems crash). Caris's line following
allows you to simply point to the line on the image and *bam*, it is
done (well as far as it can before it finds an intersection or
something.).
	Another approach that I'd like to be able to do is similar to arc
functions where I take a tiff image, turn it into a grid and run an aml
that automatically digitizes every line on the map, meaning all I have
to do is clean up some of the messy stuff and code the lines. 
	Does anyone know how I can do this stuff in Grass, or am I looking in
the wrong place?

Thanks in advance,
Josh Zeckser