Pan is a news client

News client

A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...

 for multiple operating systems, developed by Charles Kerr and others. It supports offline reading, multiple servers, multiple connections, fast (indexed) article header filtering and mass saving of multi-part attachments encoded in uuencode

Uuencode

Uuencoding is a form of binary-to-text encoding that originated in the Unix program uuencode, for encoding binary data for transmission over the uucp mail system.The name "uuencoding" is derived from "Unix-to-Unix encoding"...

, yEnc

YEnc

yEnc is a binary-to-text encoding scheme for transferring binary files in messages on Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead over previous US-ASCII-based encoding methods by using an 8-bit Extended ASCII encoding method...

 and base64

Base64

Base64 is a group of similar encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation...

; images in common formats can be viewed inline. Pan is free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 available for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

, NetBSD

NetBSD

NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...

, OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...

, and Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

Pan is popular for its large feature set. It passes the Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval

Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval

The Good NetKeeping Seal of Approval or GNKSA is a designation that indicates a piece of Usenet newsreader software meets a set of usability and formatting standards...

 2.0 set of standards for newsreaders. However, it presently lacks useful documentation. As of January 2011

January 2011

January 2011 was the first month of the current year. It began on a Saturday and ended after 31 days on a Monday.- Portal:Current events :This is an archived version of Wikipedia's Current events Portal from January 2011....

, the user manual consists of a three line apology for the lack of information.

Name

The name Pan originally stood for Pimp-ass newsreader. As Pan became an increasingly popular and polished application, the full name was perceived to be unprofessional and in poor taste, so references to it have been removed from the program and its website.

External links

• Pan official homepage