[GRASSLIST:5142] importing text with v.label

[Kirk R. Wythers]

I am looking for some advice as to how I should handle text that occurs 
in a vector layers of a "home grown" GIS that I am moving into GRASS. 
The vector lines, points and polygons were no trouble. I was able to 
write a short awk script that parsed an ascii file from the old GIS 
into the format that GRASS could read with v.in.ascii. However, I am a 
bit puzzled as how to handle text that the old GIS used for things like 
naming roads, naming experiments, etc. In a way of background this 
original GIS was based on a CAD system, so it is a quasi drawing 
program with its roots in dxf layers. The ascii files from the old GIS 
contain labeling information about each geographic object, including 
the text font, size, orientation and color!

My question therefor is this: In a GRASS world, at what point does text 
info belong in a database and at what point does it belong as a label? 
It looks as if v.label is designed for this kind of thing, but having 
never used it I thought I'd throw this out before for list reflection 
before I dumped several hours into it.

Thanks in advance for the advice,

Kirk R. Wythers	
Dept. of Forest Resources
University of Minnesota
email: kwythers at umn.edu
tel: 612.625.2261
fax: 612.625.5212