CGM<->PIC Translator

[A.MILEWSKI]

CGM<->PIC Summary(?)

About a month ago I broadcasted a request for information on
translating Common Graphics Metafile (cgm) format files
to UNIX pic format and vice versa. The promised summary of
responses is easy: No one had a translator; two people asked what cgm was.

I am surprised so I will broaden the question.  What is the best way to solve
this very common situation:
We have people doing assorted text editing AND lots of graphics vugraphs
on an assortment of machines.
Often we need to take part of a vugraph and include it as a figure in
a document.  Often we want to share pictures amongst ourselves via e-mail.
Often it would be nice to draw most of a picture and
then send it to our "computer-aided art" department for
beautification.

About half the people use UNIX-based machines,
drawing with a picture editor that outputs UNIX/pic format
files (i.e.CIP on 630's). Documents, figures and vugraphs are troffed on
a shared printer.
About half the people use DOS-based machines,
a variety of picture editors and usually have their own printers for
graphics.
Documents are usually still troffed on a UNIX host with figures pasted in.

What we need is a common graphics metafile format that can
be translated to and from by all these things. 

UNIX experts say that Postscript 
is now the de facto standard metafile. 
DOS experts say that essentially
no DOS-based drawing packages accept Postscript as input (they
all output it, of course, to printers). The metafile format
becoming the standard for DOS-applications is ANSI standard cgm.

Had I found a pic<->cgm translator,
CGM would make a good metafile with translation
to and from UNIX/pic for troffing and for use with CIP.

What do I do now?

AL MILEWSKI  ...att..!ihnp4!homxb!aemil