direct transfer of text primitives in input file to output?

[Robert Hollingsworth]

Hello all,
from my reading of the mapserver source and from a couple of experiments, it
appears that mapserver is not able to open, say, an input source called
ROAD_ANNOTATION.SHP, where the shapes in the file are of type TEXT, and
directly render them into the output image.  I'd be expected instead to
construct a Layer around this with LABELITEM, LABELANGLEITEM, LABELSIZEITEM
set to agreeable attrs from the DBF file (with the most critical being an
attribute containing the actual string value from the shape), LABEL.TYPE =
ANNOTATION, then construct a CLASS and LABEL in the Layer so that my text
would make it to the output anyway.

My issue with this is that I'll be implementing support for a proprietary
vector file format as input that contains text primitives, and I'd like all
of the placement and style parameters to go straight to the output image as
the actual shape, rather than having to duplicate as many as possible of
these params in the Mapfile as Label params.

So my question is, am I missing something obvious, or is Mapserver simply
unwilling to translate text primitives in the input file directly into the
output without engaging the LABEL mechanism?

Thanks,
REH