response 1 of 34:

Jul 27 03:10 UTC 1994

Hit 'h' at any trn prompt.

response 3 of 34:

Jul 27 13:51 UTC 1994

I **do** hit 'h'. I never understand any of that stuff. Sometimes when I
log on I see messages I've already read, or messages that are a week
old. I don't understand this "thread" business at all. And I don't seem
to be able to post! After I wrote a post, it said "access denied" or
something to that effect. Any help would be much appreciated!!

response 5 of 34:

Jul 28 06:20 UTC 1994

You don't have to thread in trn. Anway, the most important simple
commands (I think) are:  g <newsgroup name>, to join a newsgroup;
   =    (to see a list of article titles, before reading any); 
entering the number of an article you want to read;  c   to mark all
items in that newsgroup as read. If you want to enter a response in
that newsgroup, before doing a    q   to leave it, enter    f. 
(Whooee.. did I mis-remember anything?)

response 7 of 34:

Jul 28 16:00 UTC 1994

man trn is 50 pages long. I can invoke Save Stream and let it loose, but
my pager will stick in a --more-- for every screen. Dave, how can I
disable that temporarily, so I can save the whole output without
interruptions?

response 9 of 34:

Jul 28 22:05 UTC 1994

Or you can use an output-direction thingy, more commonly known as
a >

I.e., rcurl, you can run this Unix command:

        man trn > trnmanual

And then download the file "trnmanual" as you would a normal file.
You can even "cat trnmanual" and do it as a text capture.

response 11 of 34:

Jul 29 01:48 UTC 1994

Wouldn't you need to somehow tell sz to take its input from stdin?  Maybe
man trn | sz -         ?  Or is it smart (or dumb) enough to assume that
if stdin isn't a tty it's the data?  (I know, RTFM.)

Jeff, I don't really know csh, but can't you unset PAGER or something
like that rather than resetting it to cat?  Not much difference in the
long run.

If you go to look at the output of what Rob suggested (which is the way
I usually do it myself) you'll see all sorts of _^H things, which are supposed
to make more or less do emphasis of some kind and underline on a lot of
printers.  You can edit out all those things at one whack with vi, if you
don't want them:
:%s/_^V^H//g
is the command.  (You actually type control-V control-H.)  Or you could
pipe it through sed or something with some similar command, I think.
Occasionally there are other overprinted things, too - scan for control-H
if you need to.

response 13 of 34:

Jul 29 04:37 UTC 1994

If the output is going to a tty and PAGER is not set, man will usually
default to "more".  In this case, you really do have to explicitly
set PAGER to "cat" or pipe man's output through cat.  (Man might
have a switch to tell it "no pager", but it's a lot easier to remember 
"man | cat" than it is to remember which systems have the flag, and
what the flag is.)

response 15 of 34:

Jul 29 06:24 UTC 1994

I ran a    man trn | cat, with Save Stream on, which did save the file
to my computer, but there are random errors in line lengths/format. I
think I'm going to have to save it to a file, and do a regular download.
So what would that be?  man trn | cat > trnmanual   ?

response 17 of 34:

Jul 29 14:18 UTC 1994

And in general: if you're redirecting a process's output to a file, just
proces > file - no need to do   process | cat > file.

response 19 of 34:

Jul 29 21:24 UTC 1994

Cat simply displays the contents of a file to the screen.  The name is
short for concatinate because the same program can be used to combine
files.  Piping somehting through cat is redundant, however, specifying cat
as a pager will force other programs to simply dump the file instead of
going through a pager that processes the text.  Any pipe or redirection
would cause man to forget about its pager. 

If you man trn | cat to many printers, the _^H sequences would print
the underscore character, move the carrage back one space, and print
the next letter.  This is (was) a good way to underline.  Pagers like
more, less, and (I gather from context) col know about this trick and
take characters that should be underlined and try to sent them to your
terminal underlined or in a different color or something.

response 21 of 34:

Sep 11 18:18 UTC 1994

I tried to find again the lists of Newsgroups, Alt-Newgroups, Gateways and
Moderators, that I had found in news.announce.newusers. They were articles
#538 to 544. However, I now find only one article in news.announce.newusers
(#636), after using  U   to unread what I had read. Can I recover those
articles, or have they disappeared into limbo? (I don't need them myself,
but I wanted to refer a newuser to them.)

response 23 of 34:

Sep 11 19:46 UTC 1994

I thought I recalled that when I ran trn for the *first* time, I was
fed news.announce.newusers, which has this stuff newusers need (including
Etiquette, etc). What group (if any) are newusers provided now, to help
them start?