Main Group Window Areas |
The basic structure and operation of the group window is covered in an
ealier tutorial: Tutorial 5: Newsreading
Basics. This tutorial covers more advanced features of the Group
Reader window. At the top of the window are a set of register tabs which can be used to move between the several areas of the group window.
You can click on one of the tabs to go to the associated section of this tutorial.
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Status Bar & Abort Button
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In the main newsreading area near the top of the window is the status bar,
which looks like this:
On the left side of the status bar is a brief message which indicates the current action. It lists states such as Idle, D/L'ing Articles (N of M), etc. On the right side of the status bar is a bar graph showing the approximate percentage completion of the current action. Some actions such as downloading articles only update the status approximately every 100 lines. On the far right of the status bar is a small stop button which can be pressed to halt the current network operation. For example, if you start downloading a very long article by mistake, pressing this will stop that operation. Pressing it during batch downloading of articles will halt that operation, and so on. This button will be ghosted if no operation is in progress or if the current operation is not abortable. |
Article Status Icon |
On the left side of the article list is a small status icon which displays
the current state of the listed article. The exact look of the icons will
depend on your current MUI preferences:
By clicking in the column that displays the status icon, you can cycle an individual article between Normal, Cached, and Permanent. |
Group Window Toolbars |
The article list toolbar looks like this:
You can click on the buttons to move to the associated section of this tutorial. The article viewer toolbar looks like this:
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Mode Changing Arrows
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These buttons move the article list between All Articles, All Threads, and One Thread modes. |
FAQ Manager
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This button opens up the group's FAQ Manager . The FAQ manager can fetch group FAQ ("Frequently Asked Questions") files from a FAQ server and display them locally. |
Hilight Filters
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This button opens a list of Hightlight Filters. Highlight filters
are simply selection filters which cause an article's subject to be
highlighted in the
Article List. For example, here
is an example of a hilight filter which matches all articles with
Steinway or Baldwin in the subject line:
This sort of filter can be used to make particular articles stand out from the others. Any NewsRog selection filter may be used. The Update button will re-highlight all visible articles according to the current set of enabled filters. |
Read/ Unread Toggle
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These buttons determine whether read article, unread articles, or both,
are displayed in the article list. If neither button or both buttons are
pushed (depressed), then all articles are displayed.
If the only read button
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One Author Button
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If this button is depressed, then the article list is restricted to
viewing articles by one particular author. When this button is pushed,
the author of the currently article highlighted in the article list is
remembered, and only articles by this author are displayed.
Note that this is orthogonal to any other restrictions in place. For
example, if you are in
One Thread
mode, only articles by the chosen author in that particular thread are
displayed. To display all articles in the current group by a particular
author, first move to
All Articles
mode and then use the
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Remove Articles Button
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This button is used to remove articles or threads from the article list on
a temporary basis. Articles removed in this manner will re-appear the
next time the group is opened (as long as they haven't been expired or
killed and meet all the proper criteria for being displayed). Contrast
this with the Kill button, which removes articles
for good.
The hotkey 'z' (lower case) invokes the Remove Selected Articles function, while 'Z' (upper case) invokes Remove Selected Threads. |
Kill Button
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This button provide an easy way to create kill files. A small popup
window that looks like this will appear:
The first cycle gadget choses the kill type. The choices are:
The second cycle gadget selects between:
The Expiration control is only available if Kill Current & Future Articles has been selected. If the checkbox is unset, then the kill filter entry that has been created will never expire. If it is checked, however, then the kill filter entry will expire after the indicated period of disuse. For example, if you chose to kill all articles in a particular thread now and in the future, then the kill filter entry that accomplishes this will disappear after nothing has been posted to that thread for the indicated period of time. This makes it easier to manage kill filters. The Location gadget controls how kill filter entries are created:
The results of using this easy front end to kill filters can be changed or examined by hand as well. A group specific kill filter of the type HeaderMatch called is created called Thread/Author Kill. This filter can be found in the Select Filters tab of the group window. You might want to add, remove, or change various entries by hand. Lastly, pressing the Kill button will kill the indicated articles and if required, add to the Thread/Author Kill filter. Pressing the Cancel button will close the window and not do anything else. |
View Button
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The article list view button allows you to change the currently enabled
set of selection filters. In effect, you can define different
Views onto the current group, and select one or more of them at any
given time. Pressing this button yields a small popup window like this:
This window lists both selection filters defined for this group only, and global selection filters defined in the configuration area. Any combination of filters can be toggled on or off here, and when the Update button is pressed, the popup window will close and the article list will update to display articles matched by the newly enabled set of selection filters. By default, the selection filters are used in Any mode. That is, an article matches will be displayed if it matches any enabled filters. But this can be changed in the main selection filter list to All mode, in which only articles that match all enabled filters are displayed. The Close button will close the popup window but will not immediately update the article list. |
Action Button
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This will pop up a list of defined action filters:
Any combination of action filters may be selected, and when the Run button is pressed, the action filters will be run against the currently selected set of articles. If necessary, articles may be fetched from the network at this time. |
Article Viewer Movement
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These buttons move the view to the top or bottom of the currently displayed article. |
Post New & Followup
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The PostNew button
( Note that the "Replies" option in display filters can be turned on or off to modify the initial text when posting followups to articles. For instance, you might turn this option on in a HideSig filter to remove signature blocks automatically. |
Article Viewer Browsing
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Pressing the forward browse button
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The reverse browse button
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Article Movement
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Pressing the forward article button
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The reverse article button
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Thread Movement
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Pressing the forward thread button
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The reverse thread button
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Article Text Searching
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This button is similar to the list search buttons available elsewhere, but instead it searches for the indicated text through the article body of the article displayed in the article view area. |
Article Text Clipping
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This button is similar to the clip buttons available elsewhere, but instead it copies the currently selected text from the article viewer into the system clipboard. |
Group Specific Filters | The group specific filter areas allow you to define a set of filters that apply only to this particular group. Filters that apply to more than one group may be defined in the configuration area. |
Searching in Article Bodies |
The article list search window (accessed via the
The Match Header gadget can be used to select among various header that the search will be restricted to. For example, you can perform a Dynamic search only through the Subject: headers of posts, or only through the From: headers. There are also several other custom values:
The Update Disp button is only available when one of the article body search options has been selected. It controls whether the article view updates each time a match has been found. Doing this slows the search since each article must be formatted for display, but it allows you to see the results of the search as you type. The Search from RAM button is also only available when one of the article body search options has been selected. When selected, all cached articles will be loaded into memory, and further searches will happen from the versions in memory, which is much faster that searching from disk, but can take a considerable amount of memory if there are many or large articles. A status update will be displayed while the articles are being loaded; this may take a few moments. If loading the articles would result in less than 4 Mb being available, the operation will not be performed. |
Group Config |
There are three main areas in the group specific configuration options:
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Group Window Menus |
Group Project menu:
Group menu:
Article List menu:
The Viewer Article menu commands operate on the article displayed in the article viewer:
The Partial (Multipart) menu commands include the following operations:
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Group Statistics Window |
Note that the size computation relies on the Bytes: header returned by the news server, which may be missing or inaccurate. |
Filter Toolbar |
You may move the filter toolbar, seen here on the left, to the right, top, or bottom of the article view area by setting the Filter Toolbar Location in the Configuration window. Since vertical screen area is more limited than horizontal, the left and right settings are recommended over the top and bottom. You may also display the filters' descriptions as a label underneath the toolbar icon, as seen here. The description will change to bold text when the filter is enabled. The filter toolbar is only updated when a group window is opened. If you add new toolbar icons, you will need to close and re-open the group in order to see them. |
Summary |
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