dhb@rayssd.UUCP (06/06/83)
I have encountered a minor problem related to the colon prompt. This is not a deragatory comment, as a general rule I don't mind the colon. It would be nice however, if people would refrain from putting excessive blank lines in their articles. Those of us who have the blank line suppression feature of "more" enabled are sometimes annoyed by having news say an article is 20 lines long and then only seeing 10 lines on the screen. Now that I have that off my chest, on to my real problem. The way I understand it, the purpose of the colon is to prevent a long article from scrolling off the screen when printing the header for the next article. If the last article in the newsgroup is one line less than this magic limit (16 lines) the colon is not printed, however, since the next article header is preceeded by the name of the newsgroup, the top of the article is scrolled off the screen!! The way I see it, this problem can be fixed in one of two ways. Either the code in "show_tail" can be made smarter and recognize that when this is the last article in the group that it needs more room, or change the line in "hdr" that curently reads "if (holdup)" so that it reads "if (holdup || ngrp)". The second one is probably easier, but has the side effect of pausing after ALL groups, not just those whose last article is longer than 13 lines (approx.). I am going to implement the second choice I outlined above and will report back as to the outcome. Dave Brierley Raytheon Co., Portsmouth RI ...!allegra!rayssd!dhb ...!brunix!rayssd!dhb
derek@sask.UUCP (06/08/83)
If I may be so bold as to suggest that the next version of readnews have an implied formfeed at the end of every article, then I feel I have done my part. Derek Andrew U of Saskatchewan
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (06/15/83)
I would rather if the VERY FIRST TIME you type something wrong in response to the colon you saw that obnoxious message but that subsequently it NEVER was printed again. If you have a CHRONIC_CONFUSED_BY_COLONS or something in your enviornment then you could get the message every time. I am very tired of seing this message at 1200 baud -- my hand is conditioned to type space to more whenever input stops and I want it to continue. Even if whitespace was ignored when a : appearswould be some help, but I think that long, chatty, error messages are only second to errors that <beep> in obnoxiousness. They also perpertrate the notion that the manual is meant as an excellent paperweight but not intended to be read. Of course, the idea of reading an inch of lpr output (the size of the 2.10 news documentation including how to install it) may strike terror in the hearts of mere mortals. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura