Introduction

New Brunswick Computing Services supports the nn news reader, a powerful, menu-driven interface to Netnews. With nn, you can read individual articles in newsgroups, respond through electronic mail to authors of articles, remail articles to other users, and post your own articles for local or more widespread distribution. In addition, special nn configuration files allow you to customize the nn environment to suit your own needs and interests.

The instructions below show one of the many methods for selecting and reading articles. They are intended only as a very brief and superficial introduction to the nn program. In order to become more proficient with nn, consult the other nn documents, available at all NBCS locations.

The nn commands are case sensitive. A capital letter has a different meaning from a lowercase letter. Be sure you type capitals and lowercase as given in the examples.

A Quick Start to nn

1. Type nn at the system prompt and press <RETURN>.
   
2. If you are asked whether you want to enter a particular newsgroup, answer y to go to the newsgroup you were in when you quit your previous session; or, answer n if you'd rather start at the beginning. You can define a presentation sequence to control the order in which newsgroups are shown to you. See the NBCS document, Customizing the nn Newsreader (UNX01401).
3. To go to a particular newsgroup, type G. At the prompt, type the name of the newsgroup.
   
4. On entering a newsgroup, you will see a menu listing of news articles. This is called the selection mode menu. (See Figure 1.) The name of the current newsgroup is in the left hand corner and each article is listed as a different line on the menu. From left to right, you will see the article id (a letter or number in the far left-hand column), the name of the author, the number of lines in the article, and the subject of the article. A > or - in the subject column means that the subject is the same as the preceding subject.
   
5. To unsubscribe to the current newsgroup, type U.
   
6. Select the articles you want to read by typing their article id letter or number. For example, if you want to read articles a, b, c, and h, type: abch . Depending on your terminal type, the selected articles will be either highlighted in reverse video or marked with an asterisk, *.
   
7. When you have selected all of the articles on the current menu that you want to read, press <SPACE> (the space bar). If another selection mode menu appears, the current newsgroup contains more articles than could be displayed on a single screen. Select the items that you want to see on this menu using the method described in step 7 and again press <SPACE>.

Newsgroup: comp.text                   Articles: 28 of 999/8

a Ken Greer    10 >TROFF For HP/UX
b Dick Dunn    10 >>
c Scott Blachowicz 22 >>
d Mark Biggers   11 are SunOS/Sparc groff binaries available anywhere
e Micah Beck    17 TransFig 2.1.4 Patchlevel 1 Available
f Michael Haardt  5 How do you use german "Umlaute" in different roffs?
g Wolf Paul    43 >
h Zeyd Ben-Halim  4 GROFF for DOS
i Kien Quan     5 Tex to WordPerfect and WordPerfect to Tex converters
j Jay Sekora    19 >RTF/DIF/??? What should I do?
k Brain in Neutral 23 >
l John R. Levine  34 -
m Brain in Neutral 6 >RTF/DIF/??? What should I do? (correction)
n John Carpenter  7 DisplayWrite to WordPerfect
o Chris Phillips  6 Can PostScript be embedded in MS Word?
p Kenneth Knight  13 Full-article data bases
q Chris Lewis  1859 Official Patch 8 for Psroff 3.0
r W C Thompson   12 E-mail addresses for publishers?
s Phil Hughes   13 >

 14:16  SELECT  help:? Top 66%
Text processing issues and methods.

Figure 1: The selection mode menu.

Reading Articles

1. Once you have seen all selection mode menus for the current newsgroup, press <SPACE> to enter reading mode.
   
2. To select all articles in a newsgroup and immediately move to reading mode, type =.X (the equals sign, the period, and capital X).
   
3. Once in reading mode, you will see the contents of the first article you selected in the group. If the article is more than one screen long, press <SPACE> to move to the next screen or <DELETE> (or <BACKSPACE>) to move to the previous screen. At the end of the article, <SPACE> will move you to the next selected article. When you have seen the last selected article, <SPACE> will return you to selection mode, and the menu for the next newsgroup will be displayed. (See Figure 2.)

---

Brain in Neutral: >RTF/DIF/??? What should I do?        23 Jan 92 02:23
From article <1992Jan22.211449.15090@Princeton.EDU>, by js@Princeton.EDU (Jay
Sekora):
> Michael P. Capron writes
>> Thanks to John Levine and the other person who responded to my RTF query:
>> > RTF is painfully verbose and not easy to produce or decode.
>> > For Unix users, there is a pretty nice bunch of RTF code available by FTP
>> > from primate.wisc.edu.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for further help,
>> Mike Capron
>> capron@lareth.uucp
>
> I can't find primate.wisc.edu. There's a uakari.primate.wisc.edu which
> I was able to find an IP address for, but it doesn't seem to accept
> anonymous FTP. What's the IP address of this site? Or are the Unix
> RTF sources available elsewhere? Thanks, j.

There is no machine named primate.wisc.edu; that's just the name of our
domain. Try ftp.primate.wisc.edu (128.104.230.11).

I can't vouch for whether the RTF stuff there is any good, though.
 15:53 comp.text LAST+next help:?Top 46%

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Figure 2: An article in reading mode.

4. To reply to the author of an article, press r. To send a followup article to the newsgroup, press f. Either command will start the Emacs editor, letting you compose your response. To exit Emacs and retain the message for sending, type <CTRL>X<CTRL>S (hold down the <CONTROL> key and type X, then hold down the <CONTROL> key and type S). At the Action: prompt, type s to send the message and press <RETURN>.
   
5. Repeat the selection and reading steps above until you have seen all of your subscribed newsgroups or want to quit. If you need help at any time along the way, type ? and a help page will be displayed.

Exiting nn

1. To quit nn, type Q. All of the articles that you read, as well as those that you chose not to read in the newsgroups you visited, will be marked as read; you will not see them the next time you run nn.
2. If you quit nn before reading all unread articles, the next time you start nn, you will be asked if you would like to continue in the newsgroup where you left off. See step 3 in "A Quick Start to nn" above.

For More Information

Questions on nn should be directed to the OIT/NBCS Help Desk (732-445-HELP). You can also send electronic mail to the address help on any OIT system (e.g., help@eden.rutgers.edu or help@rci.rutgers.edu) or post a message to the newsgroup ru.comp.qa.news .