After you've downloaded articles, double-tap the group name (not the check box) to see the threads that make up the group. Ink Spot will take a few seconds to thread the articles, then will display the thread list in chronological order.
Before the subject of each thread, Ink Spot will list the number of articles unread in the thread and the total number of articles in the thread. This is the number of articles now on your PDA, not the number on the news server nor the number downloaded and deleted.
You will see a new button next to the menu bar, find
. The Group menu has been replaced by the
Thread menu, which has some new options, Post
new article, Add to killfile, Delete Read Articles, Delete All
Articles, Mark Articles Read, Mark
Articles Unread, Mark Server Read, and Mark Server Unread.
Tap the thread title to read the first article in the thread, or tap the icon next to the thread subject to see a list of articles and their authors. Tap an article to read it.
While you are reading an article, Ink Spot will add a number of
buttons, previous thread 
, previous article
, next article 
, next thread 
, delete this article ![[single trashcan]](images/delarticle.jpg){kind=small}
, and delete this thread ![[double trashcan]](images/delthread.jpg){kind=small}
. The Thread menu will be
replaced by an Article menu, with new options too, Copy to Notepad, ROT 13, Show Headers, Reply to
Article, Forward via email, Delete This Article, Delete This
Thread, and Mark Article Unread.
Reading is very intuitive. The scroll bar will move you through the list of
threads or the current article. When an article is shown on the screen,
the and buttons will display the previous and next
articles. The and buttons show the first article in
the previous or next thread.
If you are at the end of a thread, will
act like .
Note that at the beginning of a thread, will
not act exactly like , the former will
go to the last article in the previous thread, while the latter
will go to the first.
While reading an article, tapping the Thread tab will return you to the thread list. In the thread list, tapping the Group tab will return you to the group list. Tapping the close box in any view will quit Ink Spot. (Note: PSPC users must use the Close option under the File menu to quit Ink Spot.)
By default, Ink Spot will "thread" articles, grouping articles related to the same subject together. All articles that are in response to a specific article are grouped under that article, in a standard hierarchical list. If you are really in a hurry, you can save the few seconds Ink Spot spends threading and look at the articles in chronological order only. Ink Spot will also display articles in reverse chronological, with newest articles at the top of the screen.
Go to the View options section of the preferences. You will see two check boxes, "Use threading" and "Reverse thread order". Check these options (or uncheck them) to display articles and threads as you wish. If you enter the preferences from the thread view, the view should refresh automatically when you return. If you want to refresh the thread view yourself, select the Rethread option from the Thread menu.
Ink Spot allows you to change the way you read news in several different ways.
When it is first installed, Ink Spot uses the Tahoma font as its default font for all views. You can change the font face and size Ink Spot uses in the preferences, under the Article, Thread, and Group View Options tabs. Since we use your PDA's built-in HTML view for displaying articles, and it only supports font sizes of "tiny", "very small", "small", "medium", "large", "very large", "huge", and "enormous", these are your options in the size picker.
Some articles contain less text per line than your PDA has screen space to display, leaving you with lots of unused space on the right side of the screen. Other articles have more text per line (especially on narrow PDAs, like the PSPC). These lines are wrapped with line breaks in unnatural places, giving the message an odd, double-spaced look, like this:
This might be how a paragraph with long lines displays on your PDA because of the lack of screen space to display it properly.
Under the View options tab in the preferences is an option entitled "Auto-remove CRs". This will reflow the text in posts to read more naturally. The above example would look like this instead:
This might be how a paragraph with long lines displays on your PDA because of the lack of screen space to display it properly (with auto-remove CRs turned on).
The Auto-remove CRs option is also available from the Article menu while reading an article. Changing this in the Article menu changes your preference in the prefs as well.
Another view option you can change is viewing full headers. Ink Spot will always display the subject and author. If you want, you can view all header information in with the article. (To use this option, you cannot be discarding headers.) Under the View options tab in the preferences, check the "Show all headers" option.
If you just want to see the headers for a particular article, rather than changing the global preference, you can bring up a window that displays the headers. You can do this in one of two ways: either choose the Show headers option from the Article menu, or simply tap the headers section of the article view. If you're discarding headers, an abbreviated set of headers will be shown.
When an article has information you want to print, e-mail or hang on
to, you can save it to a file. Display the article (tap on the news group,
tap on the thread, tap until
you see the article), then under the File menu select Save as.
Much of Netnews is, let's face it, silly and unproductive. The rest is just garbage. Ink Spot lets you remove the garbage quickly and easily so that you can be silly and unproductive. (Send all replies to: talbutt@dejavusoftware.com.)
Ink Spot has three options for keeping track of what has been read and what hasn't:
The options to mark and unmark all articles on the server are in the Thread or Group menu while the threads or groups are shown. (You won't see this option when reading an article. Don't worry about it.) This plays "catch up" with your news server. The Mark Server Read option tells Ink Spot to consider all articles that were on the server when you last downloaded as read. This is good when you start reading news, and have some very busy news groups. The Mark Server Unread does the opposite. Ink Spot discards all information about what you have downloaded and read, and what you haven't. The next time you download, you may download articles you have already seen.
The options to mark articles read and unread affect all downloaded articles in a group. When viewing groups, these options affect all selected groups. When viewing threads in a group, these options affect only the group shown. The option to mark an article as unread is available only when viewing an article. There is no option to mark an article as read, because Ink Spot can't tell the difference between viewing an article, and viewing an article and reading it.
If you find that the articles you are reading are regularly out-of-date, you can tell Ink Spot to always download the newest articles from the newsgroup instead of the oldest. This has the benefit of always keeping you up-to-date with the newsgroup, no matter how infrequently you read news. To select this option, go to the Download options section of the preferences, and check the "Download newest messages" box.
You'll need to delete articles to free up space to download more
articles. Ink Spot will not write over articles. When viewing groups, you
can delete all articles in the checked groups, or all read articles in the
checked groups. Deleting does not affect groups that aren't checked. When
viewing threads for a group, you can delete all articles in the group, all
read articles, or just the currently selected thread or article. When
viewing an article, you can delete the current article (using either the
menu option or the button), or
all articles in the thread (using either the menu option or the button).
You can also set Ink Spot to automatically delete articles for you. Go to the Scheduling section of the preferences. Here you can select whether you want to delete all articles or just those that have been read. You can then set Ink Spot to automatically delete articles before downloading more, or when Ink Spot closes. Be aware that these settings affect all groups, not just those that have been checked in the group view.
Most often, you'll find you want to add a person or subject to your killfile while reading an article. You'll say to yourself, "Self, why did I waste my time downloading this?" A well-maintained killfile means faster downloading because Ink Spot will skip articles about things and by people you've told it to avoid.
To easily add an author or subject to your killfile, tap the Add to killfile option of the Article menu while the article is shown on your screen. The "add to killfile" dialog will appear, with the article's author and subject already filled in for you. Select whether you want to kill all articles with this author/subject, or you want to require articles to have this author or subject, or you don't care about the author or subject.
Then tap Add and you never have to be bothered again. You can delete part of the subject or author line. If, for example, you are reading an article about chocolate cookies, and decided you don't want to read anything about chocolate in general, you would scratch out cookies. Ink Spot would not download any article with chocolate in the subject.
If you check the "Add to all group killfiles" box, the entry you create will be added to the killfile for every group. If you select the Add to killfile option while viewing threads or groups, the author and subject lines will be blank, and you will fill them in.
The find option searches articles in the group for a word or phrase you specify. It is available when viewing threads or an article.
Tap the button, and enter the word
or phrase you want to find. You can choose to search in headers as well as
message bodies, to match whole words or partial words, and to search case
insensitively. When you've made your entry, tap OK and Ink Spot will
begin searching for the word.
When viewing an article, choosing Find from the
Article menu will start at the beginning of the current article. If the
word is found in that article, and you use Find from that article again,
it will never get past that article. After you find a word in an article,
you need to use Find Again to find the next instance. When viewing
threads, find will always start at the beginning of the first article in
the first thread. If Ink Spot finds the word in any article, it will
display the article. If it doesn't find the word, it will display a
message.
ROT13 is a primitive encoding method that still occasionally appears on Netnews. Each letter is rotated 13 positions in the alphabet. A becomes N, N becomes A. Non-letters are not affected, and case is preserved. You can use ROT13 to decode posts.
While an article is displayed, tap the Article menu, and choose ROT13. All text in the article will be rotated.
The tabs that you use to navigate between views can be moved all around the screen. In the preferences, under the Advanced tab, you can choose to have the tabs on the left, right, or bottom of the window.
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