Re: [Pan-users] Newbie question about unviewable posts

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson posted on Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:55:02 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:23:15 -0700, Graham Lawrence wrote:
> 
>> I click the post header in the top right pane, and sometimes the
>> associated text appears in the bottom right pane, and sometimes it
>> doesn't.  When it doesn't, I notice that an aqua icon in its header
>> line is absent, which icon's presence means the article has been
>> cached.  So I cache the post with the right click menu, and nothing
>> happens, no icon appears in its header line, and still no text.

@ Graham:

"Pardon me, your HTML is showing."  As I'm sure you're probably aware, 
pan shows HTML in raw form and it looks rather ugly.  Some of us use pan 
to view this list as a newsgroup, and see that ugliness if you're posting 
in HTML.  So please turn it off.  (I understand that you probably didn't 
know you had it on, gmail unfortunately doesn't make that particularly 
obvious, apparently, and you appear to be using it, but you can't change 
what you don't know about, so I'm making you aware and asking nicely.)

> I see this on occasion myself, sometimes just reloading the message
> multiple times will get it to finally load.

(See the last paragraph before the next quoted bit, below, for a quick 
workaround that "Works for me."  First some explanation, etc.)

The times where I've seen this, it has seemed to be due to pan wrongly 
detecting a text post as part of a multi-part binary.  As a result, it 
won't /automatically/ handle it, it unless it sees the rest of the parts, 
which of course are never going to show up since it's being detected 
incorrectly and there ARE no other parts.

I don't personally visit groups where this is common so see it only 
infrequently, myself, and you don't mention what version you are running 
(always a good thing to mention when you're posting a question about an 
app), but FWIW, I /think/ H. Mueller may have made some changes in that 
regard in his github based "friendly-fork", if you are comfortable 
building from source.  Talking about which...

**ATTN: ALL**  I haven't seen a post here mentioning it, but HMueller 
posted to the pan-dev list/group a couple days ago that he changed his 
github username.  Instead of the former imhotep82, it's now judgefudge.  
So the new secure-http URL is:

https://github.com/judgefudge

(For those wondering if it's legit, it appears to be so to me.  The 
headers on that post and previous posts of his were very similar, and the 
public activity list at the URL above shows imhotep82 until Sept. 12, 
when there were two commits, the first as imhotep82, the second as 
judgefudge.  Unless someone (1) cracked his github account, (2) knew to 
post the change to the pan-dev list, and (3) either knew enough about 
received headers to fake them or had access to a machine at the same ISP 
from which to post the faked mail, it's legit.)

Of course, the git:// URLs would change accordingly as well:

git://github.com/judgefudge/pan2


Meanwhile, at least when I've had the problem, manually choosing "read 
article" from the context menu has solved the problem, caching and 
displaying the article.  But I'm not positive it works in /every/ case, 
only every case I've tried it on so far.  (I haven't seen the problem in 
awhile, but as I said I don't often see it in the groups I read anyway, 
and as I'm running hmueller's fast-moving development "live-git" version 
and as I said I think the problem might be fixed there, I might not see 
it again...)

> If it shows as cached but is unviewable (something else I see on
> occasion), hit 'q' to mute quoting and that seems to get it to show.

I believe this one's related to character-encoding.  There's an invalid 
character (or perhaps a valid one that pan's mishandling) in the 
character encoding set for the post, and that's screwing things up.

What might be happening if quote-toggling works around it, as it has for 
you, is that one of the upline parents quoted in the post you are trying 
to read, was posted in a different character-encoding.  The post quoting 
it *SHOULD* have either replied in the same character-encoding, OR 
converted the quote to the new encoding, but failed to do so, thus 
containing characters invalid in the claimed character-encoding, but only 
in the quoted text.  If that's the case, then muting the quotes would 
hide the invalid characters, allowing pan to display the message.

I KNOW there have been some fixes in this regard (tho they probably won't 
fix the outright invalid ones, just the ones pan was previously handling 
incorrectly) some months ago now, I think, in khaley's repo (which is 
where pkovar ultimately pulls the official releases from).  Pan was 
mishandling a number of valid characters, including no-wrap-space, etc.  
At least the ones that were caught are now handled correctly.  However, 
since I've been running git versions for quite some time, I've lost track 
of what makes it into the release versions and I don't know whether that 
made it into the latest official release, or not, tho I expect it did 
since the fixes reached git previous to the latest release, IIRC.  
However, if you're running a release before 0.135, AFAIK the latest, do 
consider upgrading, and the problem /might/ go away.  But of course if 
the characters are actually invalid for the charset that the post body is 
claiming to use...

(I got interrupted a couple times writing this.  Hopefully I picked up 
where I left off and everything's coherent. =:^/  )

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman