Panels and/or layers

Greetings,

I'm looking for a way to set up a series of GRASS panels or layers
that can somehow be defined to the driver and subsequently
re-displayed quickly.

The need for this arises from a requirement that I display a large
number of icons (hundreds of thousands) against a background of mainly
vector data, but also potentially raster images. Currently, if I
change the background, I do it by erasing and re-drawing raster
images, then vectors, and finally icons.

Re-drawing hundreds of thousands of icons (from data extracted from a
binary file) can take several minutes. Since this involves re-drawing
data that hasn't changed, it seems like there should be a fast way to
do it, by exploiting power available in the GRASS driver.

In poking around the GRASS source code, I found C procedures to save
and restore panels. But the save_panel procedure seems to save only
that data currently on the screen. I need to save/redraw some of the
data and re-generate other data. Or better: I need to segment the
data into different panels or layers and be able re-display them at
will.

My goals may be achievable if I could do something like this:

    draw vectors to a panel
    display vector panel
    draw icons to a panel
    display icon panel

   later:

    erase screen
    draw new vectors to the vector panel
    display vector panel
    re-display existing icon panel

Can anyone offer helpful suggestions? Thanks.

- Bob

---
Robert A. Black
Principal Engineer
Calspan Advanced Technology Center
Calspan Corporation
4455 Genesee St.
Buffalo, NY 14120

What you can do, is converting the sites to raster and then use
d.rast -o to display them on any background you like.

Ronald Wiemer