[Pan-users] Re: How to download/read a bunch of selected articles?

[Duncan]

"Roger Shum" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 20 Feb 2007
19:04:21 -0800:

> With the old PAN (0.14.2), I was able to select/highlight a
> few headers in the Header pane and right mouse click on
> Read.
> Pan would download all the selected articles.
> Then I could read them.
>
> With the new PAN (0.123), it seems that I can't do this
> anymoore. Is this true? If not, how can I perform this task?

Charles apparently read your question differently than I did, so his answer
is different.  Hopefully one of us gets it right, and answers the question
you thought you were asking.  =8^)

If I understand the question, what you are asking is how to "pre-cache" the
articles, so they are already downloaded when you go to read them.  Assuming
that's correct, then yes, it's possible with new-pan, and indeed, that's one
of my main modes of using pan, tho for binaries (my connection and news
servers are fast/responsive enough that I can download text articles to
order, as I read them, without issue).

What want, then, is the "cache article" function.  This can be found on the
main article menu.  It's also on the context menu when right-clicking on an
article (or selected group of articles) in the header/overview pane.

To select the articles, the usual methods should work.  Keyboard: arrow keys
along with shift to select a range inclusively, or control and space to
select non-contiguous multiple entries.  Mouse-keyboard-combo: click-select
along with control or shift as appropriate.  Mouse-drag: works if you have
an up-to-date GTK+, as Charles mentioned.

(FWIW, I routinely use the first two selection methods above here, but never
missed mouse-drag as that just isn't intuitive to me, I guess, probably
because the drag-n-drop interface was just about to get popular when I I got
into computing, and it never worked consistently enough early on for me to
find it useful enough to consider it "intuitive" now.  Ctrl/shft-click for
multi-select, or arrow keys with ctrl/shft, are both much more intuitive to
me, and I find myself extremely frustrated if they fail to work in a GUI
interface, since I just expect them to do so.  In that regard I'm far
happier with new-pan, since old-pan broke shift-arrow keyboard selection in
ordered to allow drag select to work -- it was an either/or with GTK at the
time according to Charles, and I found pan's broken keyboard selection
personally frustrating even tho I knew why Charles made the choice he did to
break it in ordered to enable drag-select, which I /still/ never used -- I
just got used to doing shift-click only when working with pan, instead.)

--
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman