Customization
This section describes how certain features or actions in Pan can be customized.
Behavior
Many of the default actions of Pan, such as mouse clicks, actions when entering or leaving a group and the action of Space can be altered.
- In
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Mouse
The two boxes of the mouse section change the default action of the left mouse button. If unselected, you would have to double click on a group or article to activate it.
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Groups
The selections in the group section control what commands Pan will automatically run when manipulating groups.
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The first box, when activated, will automatically get new headers for all subscribed groups whenever Pan is started. This is the equivalent of using
from the menubar. -
The next box, when activated, will automatically get new headers when entering a group. This is the equivalent of using
from the menubar. -
The next box, when activated, will mark the entire group read when leaving a group. This is the equivalent of using
from the menubar. -
The last box in the Groups section, when activated, will expand all threads in the Header Pane when entering a group.
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Articles
The first option, when activated, makes Space select the next article rather than the next unread article. This is handy if you are viewing a thread with read and unread articles mixed together.
The next option activates smooth scrolling in the Article Pane.
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GUI Composition
The layout and view of the Group, Header and Body Panes in Pan can be customized in several ways.
- Pane Layout
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In
the orientation of the Groups, Header and Body Panes can be manipulated. - Tabbed Layout
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Instead of having all three panes share the Pan main window at one time, another view, called Tabbed Layout, can be activated by choosing . Now, only one of the three Panes will be displayed at a time. Each Pane is brought to the front of other Panes by clicking on its tab located directly under the tool bar or by pressing "1", "2" or "3" for the Group, Header or Body Pane respectively.
- Show/Hide Panes
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You can hide a specific Pane by choosing from
and using the selection box to show/hide each of the Panes. - Fonts
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Choose
to select a font.Pan can use the monospace font in the article Pane, if activated.
- Colors
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Choose Pan.
to customize the colors used inThe first section allows you to customize the colors used by scoring in the Header Pane. See Scoring for more information on how to use this feature.
The second section allows you to customize the colors used in the Body Pane.
External Applications
In this section you set up external applications that Pan can use.
- In :
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Web Browser
Click the Web Button to choose which external application to launch when clicking on an HTML link.
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Mail Reader
Choose which external application to launch when clicking on an email address or when sending a post via email.
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To set up an external text editor, choose
. From the Post Article dialog menubar, chooseArticle Cache Size
The article cache is a fixed-size disk buffer where Pan stores articles when they are downloaded from a news server. If the user downloads a large amount of binary attachments, the default cache size might be inadequate.
The article cache size can be changed in
News Servers
Pan must connect to a special computer called a news server. The news server is the gateway used to access Usenet.
Choose Servers dialog will appear. Click on a server name and you can edit or remove it via the buttons. Click the button to add another server.
and theWhen you add or edit an existing server, the Edit a Server's Settings dialog will appear.
In the location section:
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Address
The internet address of the server.
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Port
The port of the server. Port 119 is the standard port number for unsecured NNTP connections, port 563 is for TLS/SSL connections.
The next section is the login information for the server. If you server requires a username and password, enter them here. If the server allows anonymous login or does not require authentication, just let these fields blank.
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Username
Enter the login name if required.
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Password
Enter the password if required.
The next section allows you to enter certain Pan settings that are server specific.
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Connection Limit
Pan can open multiple connections to a server so the user can perform simultaneous actions like download a binary attachment will reading articles in a text group.
In order to follow the GNKSA rules, the maximum number of connections Pan can have open with a server is 4.
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Expire Old Articles
From this toggle box, you can pick a time when Pan will expire old articles and remove them from its article index.
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Server Rank
When you have more than 1 server configured, Pan uses server rank to decide from which server to download the article. Only after all primary servers have been tried for the article will Pan use the fallback servers.
The reason for this feature is that a user might have access to a free server and also have access to a byte-limited premium server. Server ranking allows Pan to use the fallback server as little as possible.
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TLS (SSL) Options
If security and privacy are of concern, choose secured connections if the server supports it.
TLS (SSL) support is an optional feature and may not be available in your Pan build.
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Always trust this server's certificate
If you want to trust the server regardless of the authenticity of its certificate, you can enable this option. Use with caution!