[Pan-users] Re: Help with Binaries

[Duncan]

Steve Harker posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, 
on Thu, 03 Jun 2004 20:30:36 +0100:

> I use pan as my main newsreader and up till now I haven't had any
> problems with it. I would like to post a binary picture to a newsgroup
> but I cannot find how to do this there is no attach key ? Am I missing
> something 

You're not missing anything.  PAN doesn't have that functionality, yet, at
least not automatically.

There are several possible workarounds.

1)  Use a batch posting program.  IIRC, one such program for Linux
(Unix??) is newspost.  If I got the name right, it's cli, but there's a
Gnome or GTK (IDR which) front-end called gnewspost, and there WAS a KDE
front-end as well, knewspost, but last I knew it hadn't been updated since
KDE 2.x.

2) Use another program, such as KNode, for posting.  KNode doesn't do yEnc
yet, AFAIK, but it DOES post.  Since I run KDE as my desktop of choice
anyway, it's easy for me to keep KNode installed, and I use it for such
postings, when necessary.  I prefer PAN, however, and don't do a lot of
binary posting, or I'd use the batch-poster, above.

3) If one manually encodes a binary, using uue or whatever, one can then
paste the resulting text into the PAN edit window or into the external
editor, if you use one.  PAN will then post the manually included file. 
I'm not positive it will post yEnc unbutchered, but UUE and MIME/Base64,
certainly (of course providing you set up the headers correctly manually
as well, if using MIME.. UUE isn't as picky).

4)  I mentioned PAN's external editor.  It's possible one could script
such an encoding, and then put the script in PAN's editor configure box so
invoking the external editor invokes the script instead.  I know folks
have used that sort of solution for GPG message signing their posts, and
URLs for such message signing scripts have been posted to the list b4. 
However, I've not read of anyone handling attachments that way, and it
/would/ be potentially more difficult, as signing wouldn't require any
interaction, once the script was setup, while attachments generally would,
in ordered to select the file to attach or whatever.  Of course, if one
got fancy, one could set up the script to parse the existing message text,
and take a certain sequence as indicating the file that was to be
included..  If I were to get ambitious and try it myself, that's what I'd
try to do.  However, the need is seldom enough for me that I make do just
fine with knode, when I have to.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
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