Re: Need help with Requested news.

From: Dirk A. Loedding (judge@america.net)
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1999 09:23:56 -0500

steve@sawczyn.com (Steven M. Sawczyn) wrote:

>Maybe what we need is an agent to soup converter? I know this sounds a
>bit rediculous, but it might be quite possible to do depending on how
>Agent formats its data files.

You know, I mentioned this idea a while back on
alt.usenet.offline_reader at least a year ago, if not longer. I seem to
have have deleted that post from my "posted" archive, though. I'd
likely be willing to use such a thing, if it were available. I wouldn't
mind being able to grab a SOUP packet, and then import it into an Agent
database, and then translate the reply packet (whatever format Agent
creates it in) into a reply.zip like Yarn would create. But, I'm happy
enough with Yarn, and I haven't actually played with Agent to see if
it's worth the effort.

>Why go through all this trouble? Yarn is one of the few programs
>which I've encountered which works exceptionally well with a
>speech synthesizer and, since I'm totally blind, this is
>definitely a good thing.

Glad to hear it.

>Yarn is probably going to be much easier to work with than Agent,
>so if I can somehow use Agent solely for retrieval and do the
>rest in Yarn, the time saved might be worth the trouble.

As far as I know, there are no utilities that translate Agent into SOUP,
or vice-versa...so, you'll have to decide what you prefer to use, I
suppose...

>Another possibility might be to use a news reader like Tin on a unix
>shell and somehow export selected articles to a text file which may be
>possible to convert to soup. Any thoughts on this?

That'd be a question for the tin gurus... :)

-- 
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|   Dirk A. Loedding               <*>               judge@america.net   |
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