Urgent requirement to override commandline filetype import

Hi guys, I've just joined the mail list.

I'm the developer of Puppy Linux, currently rocketing up the Distrowatch
top-100.

Puppy is a 60M live-CD, super tiny and loads totally into ram, so
freeing up the cd for other uses and also as everything is in ram
the speed is superb.
Puppy has Abiword, and the latest release has Abiword 2.2.7.

As Puppy has to be tiny, I maximise usage of whatever is there.
Puppy uses Abiword to convert text files to Postscript for printing.
There's a little script, lprshell, that does this.
Incidentally, Puppy uses PDQ and Gimp-print IJS printer drivers and
a printer configuration Wizard written by me.

Okay, the problem...
lprshell has this:
 abiword --print=/tmp/myfile.ps myfile.txt
the problem is that Abiword applies automatic filetype detection that is
far from perfect. So often it returns "Error importing file".
One would think that if Abiword was unable to determine filetype that it
would default to using the filename extension, but not so.

If I run Abiword GUI, I can choose an override in the file-open dialog
box, and I am able to open some html and text files that the automatic
system fails to open.

So, I need to be able to specify a filetype override on the commandline.
It seems that "--imp-props" is intended for that purpose, and I found a
reference to "--exp-props" being used that way, however "--imp-props"
does not seem to accept anything, it seems to be non-functional.

Does anyone know a solution to this?
Do Abiword developers read the users mail list?
It would be great/wonderful/incredible if this could be fixed in the
next few weeks so that I could put a functional Abiword filetype converter
into the next release of Puppy!

Puppy homepage:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy

There are some other issues, like complaint about missing gnome lib,
but they are non-fatal.

Regards,
Barry Kauler
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Received on Sat May 21 12:20:22 2005