Mail Merge

Hi,

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 and Abiword 3-01

I make a data file containing as the first record, the field names and put
n real records in it. I call this file DF.csv. It is just a list of data,
each record terminated by a <return> and each field terminated with a
comma. Then I make a template file using this data file, with Abiword. I
call this file TF.abw. I need to use the data file so that the record
names that I use in the template are the same as those in the data file.

Now I do a mail merge from the command line:
abiword -m DF.csv --to=ps --to-name=out TF.abw

I get n output files:
out-0, out-1,....out-{n-1}
These are postscript files as I requested. Now if I use the command
lpr -r out-*

n documents will be printed and the output files will be deleted. This
is o.k. as I didn’t want them in the first place.

This is fine if n is small as at some stage n postscript (large - about 10
times the size of the TF file) files will exist on the disk. If n is
large, it could be 100 if I am writing to the members of a small club or
many hundreds or even thousands if I write to a large group, then I need a
larger hard disk.

abiword says that I can pipe the output directly to lpr like this:

abiword --to=ps --to-name=fd://1 anyfile.abw | lpr

anyfile.abw will be printed out. This is correct, and it works, as I
believe the magic “fd://1“ is the standard output and lpr accepts standard
out as a file to print, and sends its output to the default printer. A
direct mail merge:

abiword -m DF.csv --to=ps --to-name=fd://1 TF.abw | lpr

WILL NOT WORK! as the output file is not fd:/1 but fd:/1-0, fd:1-1 and so
on, and these are not standard out, there is NO OUTPUT on standard out.
Leave out the --to-name and abiword will use TF-0, TF-1, etc.

Am I missing something here, or is it the case that abiword has no usable
mail-merge?

Leon Stedman
Secretary; UKIP South Suffolk Association
BREXIT will save our bacon. (and our fish, industry, jobs...)
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Received on Tue Aug 9 20:09:56 2016