[Pan-users] Re: Save Article

[Duncan]

Vigil posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sun, 28 Dec 2003 01:03:50 +0000:

> I'll give that a go, but it would be nice to have a simple File | Save
> Article...
> 
> On Fri, 26 Dec 2003, Michael R. McCarrey wa7qzr-at-myrealbox.com |Pan
> Users' Mailing List| wrote:
> 
>>Have you tried the "Copy to Folder" option?

Top posters.. GRR..  There's a reason PAN discourages the practice. =:^)

I'm not quite plain on what exactly you are trying to do, but if the save
article text from the save-as dialog doesn't do it (it saves to the file
system), and the copy-to-folder (which saves to PAN's fake local server,
the one it uses to track sent posts, and etc, but you get to create your
own folder aka "group" name) doesn't do it..

Occasionally, folks have wanted a method to get at the raw post text, in
its entirety, including all headers and body (thus, both attachments and
text).  If this is what you are after..

PAN saves the posts in that format in its cache, with the msg-ID header as
the file name (subject of course to modification where necessary to work
with the file system the cache is on, in terms of allowed characters and
filename length), and the .msg extension (from memory..).  Thus, you can
hit the view-headers hotkey or set PAN to always show msg-id, and then go
find the message in the cache.

Of course, if you have a cache of any size, such as my normal 2-4 gig
cache (set for 4 gig in PAN -- I was the one that asked for the bump-up in
the max from the original one-gig, that was deleting messages b4 I could
get to them at times), be sure not to load it in Konqueror or anything
else that does a bunch of extra stuff such as read the files to set up the
correct icon, or you could be waiting for awhile for the cache to load.
Here, I find mc (Midnight Commander, text mode) perfect for such tasks.

There are two other alternatives.  One is to never load the cache dir in
its entirety at all, but just specify the file name directly in your text
editor or whatever you are loading it into.

The second just occurred to me, as a result of reading MRMC's copy to
folder suggestion.  If you copy the post to a PAN folder, the same post is
again saved in raw format, but in the folder you copied it to.  If you
create a working folder for just this purpose, you can copy raw posts to
it, do what you are going to do with them, then delete or move them
elsewhere, thus, keeping the actual file system dir small enough to have
no problems loading it in your file manager of choice, even if it DOES
spend time scanning each file to assign the appropriate icon, as does
Konqueror, for instance.

Of course, the real problem comes when the post crashes pan when U try to
read it, say, to report the details as a bug.  <g>  In that case, you
can't GET the msg-id, and may not even be able to copy it to folder
without viewing it (tho that's a worthwhile technique I'll have to try, if
it ever happens to me again, now that MRMC gave me the idea).  In that
case, it can come down to doing a file content search on the entire cache,
based on what IS known about the post, from the overview (aka "header",
tho that's not technically correct, since it doesn't include all the
headers, only those available using overview) pane, such as author,
subject, date, etc. I know, it's happened to me b4.  =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin