How to…

…Read newsgroups, topics, and articles conveniently

Open a subscription. Use right-arrow to select a newsgroup, and hit Enter to show its topics.  Use down-arrow to select a topic, and hit Enter to show its articles. Scroll through the articles with the Page Down key or the Space Bar (each article will be marked as read when it’s been fully shown). When done with a topic, you can use Command-Space to immediately show the next topic. When you select a different topic or newsgroup, the previous one will be un-shown, so the window will remain consistent.

When using the Up- or Down-Arrow, or Command-Space, hold down the Option key to mark the previously-selected topic as read. Use the Mark Newsgroup Read command to mark an entire newsgroup.

…Find an article that you have already read

You may not be able find a previously read article because articles "expire" after some amount of time determined by your news administrator (two weeks is a likely time period). If the article that you want has not expired, you may be able to find it by choosing the Show All Articles in this Newsgroup item from the Reading menu. This command will show all of the articles currently in the newsgroup, not just those that you have not yet read. You can even mark some of them as unread at this time to make them stay visible until they expire.

…Post an Article or Mail a Message

See the help menu item About Posting and Mailing

…Import your Unix .newsrc file

Use a Macintosh program like Dartmouth's Fetch  to move the .newsrc file from Unix to your Macintosh. Then start InterNews  and use the Import .newsrc File… menu command to make it into a subscription.

…Browse in random newsgroups

Open (by double-clicking) the All Newsgroups subscription, then use Find… or scroll to find the newsgroups you’re interested in.  Read them as described above.

…Make a subscription containing interesting newsgroups

Choose New Subscription from the Subscriptions menu.  Click on the name of the resulting icon and type to rename it. Open the All Newsgroups subscription.  Drag interesting newsgroups to the newly-created subscription — either to the icon, or to the newsgroups (top) pane in the open window. You can also use the Add Newsgroup command in the Reading menu if your reading window is open.

…Remove newsgroups from a subscription

Either select the newsgroup and choose Remove Newsgroup from the Reading menu, or drag the newsgroup back into the All Newsgroups subscription icon or reading window. You can also remove newsgroups using the dialog that appears when you choose the Add Newsgroup command in the Reading menu.

…Cancel a long-running operation

Hold down the Command key (âŒ˜) and type a period or click on the Cancel or Stop buttons in the progress alert.

…Save an article as text

You can save an article as a text file, or append an article to an existing text file. If there is only one article in a topic, you can do either of these without seeing the article. Simply select the topic and choose the appropriate command from the File menu. If there is more than one article in a topic, InterNews does not know which one to save. So you must open the topic first by double-clicking on the topic. Then select the article of interest in the bottom pane. Then you can choose the appropriate command from the File menu.

If an article has more than 32,000 characters it cannot be fully displayed or printed. It will all be saved or appended to a file, however.

…Download binary files from articles

Select the topic that includes the first part of the binary sequence (there are usually more than one). If there is more than one article in the topic, you have to open it with a double-click and select the article in the bottom pane. It will probably have just one article in it. You may see get an alert that says that the text is greater than 32K.

Choose Save Article As Text from the File menu and save it. Do the same for the rest of the topics/articles, appending them to the same text file. Be careful to append them in order. The subject of the article (and topic) usually tells you the sequence number. THEY ARE NOT ALWAYS PRESENTED IN ORDER!

When all are in the text file, switch to the Finder  and open that file with the appropriate program to convert it. For binhexed files, use something that does binhex decoding like StuffIt! . For images use something like UULite  to decode to PICT or GIF files.

…Change the creator type of saved articles

Articles can be saved as text files. You can specify the program that will be launched to view those files. The default is 'MSWD' for Microsoft ® Word.  To change this, edit 'STR ' resource id 2000 in InterNews using ResEdit™ or an equivalent. [Alternately, you can close all windows and choose the Configure for your Site... item from the Edit menu. Be careful about changing any other parameters in this dialog.]

…Report bugs, or make suggestions about future versions of InterNews

Send electronic mail to InterNews by BlitzMail, or post discussion contributions to the dartmouth.news.internews newsgroup.
[Send electronic mail to internews@dartmouth.edu.]