As described in section on Page 
, metafiles may be used for
the production of hardcopy output via the command GRPLOT.
However, there are output devices for which there may not be support within
GRPLOT, or it may be desired to combine pictures into documents existing
in a particular output format or Page Description Language.
For these and other reasons it is often useful to be able to transform
a metafile into a different format, and to accomplish this the utility
GRCONV has been written. Note, however, that keeping the
original picture in the form of a metafile is the most flexible, as
this does not place any restrictions on its final use.
GRCONV converts the input metafile to a new format which is stored on one
or more output files. For example, GRCONV can produce as output
normal or Encapsulated PostScript files, files of Tektronix 4014
escape sequences, or bit maps in IBM 3812 format.
The PostScript files may be printed at CERN using the XPRINT
command, as well as being used as a mechanism for the transmission of pictures
for printing at external institutes.
Pictures encoded in Encapsulated PostScript format
(see section on Page )
also may be incorporated into documents produced by SGML, BookMaster,
or TeX text processing systems.
The Tektronix 4014 escape sequences may be used to drive some laser printers,
including the DEC LN03, which do not support PostScript.
GRCONV operates in one of three modes: Interactively, in which it prompts for input and allows a selection of pictures chosen by commands from an alpha-numeric terminal to be converted; Batch, in which all the relevant parameters must be given on the command line and in which the whole metafile is converted; and Remote-Batch which is similar to the last case but in which the command is executed on a remote machine. Thus, whilst Interactive and Batch modes run locally, the Remote-Batch mode allows the input metafile to be converted into a form which may only be available on the remote host. For example, this feature allows GRCONV to subsume the old GKSSGML by producing a set of IBM-3812 bitmap files on CERNVM.
More details of how GRCONV operates may be found in reference
[9], or by typing HELP GRCONV or
FIND GRCONV.