Re: [Pan-users] Pan Docs 070101

[Douglas Bollinger]

On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:32:58 -0500
Darren Albers <address@hidden> wrote:

> First of all I think what you have done is wonderful and will be a great 
> help to all the new Pan users!   If you don't mind can you open a bug 
> ticket and attach your help file so Charles can see it and hopefully it 
> gets added by the 1.0 release?

Thanks.  Once the docs goes through a couple of more revisions I will do that.

> Section 2:
>     Should a link to a couple of sites that describe Usenet etiquette be 
> included here or maybe a whole new section on it?
>     For example:
>     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/posting-rules/part1/
>     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/primer/part1/
>     http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/writing-style/part1/

For now, I'm following Gnome's doc guidelines for in-line help and I don't see
any other docs linking out-of-document.  Everything in the docs should be
self-contained.  The above links would be great for the wiki, however.  Pan
docs and the wiki should supplement each other.

> Section 3.1
>     I would add a note that if your provider does not require 
> authentication to leave the username and password field blank.

I'll reword the existing text.

> Section 3.6:
> I think this line "A binary file on Usenet is usually composed of many 
> smaller articles.  Pan automatically organizes all these articles under 
> one special article header."
>  should be:  "A binary file on /the/ Usenet /are/ usually composed of 
> many smaller articles.  Pan automatically organizes all these articles 
> under one special article header."

Well, this has been discussed thoroughly.  In the Wikipedia, it's just
"Usenet" so I'll follow that guideline.  Probably should be "in Usenet"
though.

> 3.6:  Maybe a note here that says something like:
> "You can hold down ctrl to select multiple articles for download or use 
> shift and select the first and last articles in a string to select all 
> the articles in between"

I'll add that.

> 8.3:
> 1) Shouldn't information on NZB's be under the Binary Section?
> 2) Add a note about using pan to open NZB files from command line or 
> outside application like Firefox opens only the task manager?  For example:
>   If you use pan to directly open NZB files you have downloaded 
> elsewhere Pan will open it's task manager and prompt you for the save 
> location.

You can have a task that is not related to binaries, like grabbing headers.
NZB's are discussed briefly in the "Task" section.

Are NZB files used in other applications?

Pan's command-line options should be mentioned somewhere.  I forgot it had
any. :)

> Misc:
> 1) Should a link to the Pan-Users mailing list be included somewhere?  
> Maybe in a "For more help" section?   Since Pan is a newsreader maybe a 
> link to Gmane.org?

No external links for now.  Another good section for the wiki. 

Right now I'm fixing up some of the code in the docs as I discovered that yelp
is very tolerant of badly-formed xml.  After that chore, I should be able to
translate the file into html or whatever and I'll post another tarball for
review.

-- 
You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.