Okay, you have opened a group. MacNews will open a window that looks a wee bit like GNUS (well, they had just better not sue me for 'look and feel'). Basically, there are two segments, separated by a status line. The top segment is the list of subject lines, or the article list, for the articles you have chosen. The bottom segment is for the text of any article you wish to read. To change the relative sizes of each segment, you can drag the status line up or down, to give more viewing area to the subject lines, or to the article text.
So if you have just opened a group, this window appears, the cursor starts spinning, the status line starts telling you how many subject lines it has retrieved, and the article list will start filling up. Hopefully, this will stop soon, and you can get on with reading news.
To open an article for reading, just double click on the subject in the article list. The article text should start appearing in the lower part of the window. If you have chosen a very long article, and you have a very slow modem, you can start to read the article while it's being retrieved, by using the scroll bar or associated keys. Or, you can stick MacNews in the background under Multifinder.
Now you have the article - you can read it by using the scroll bars, or the 'Page Up', 'Page Down', 'Home' and 'End' keys (or 'V' ,'v' ,'<' ,'>' keys respectively) You can select any portion of the text by clicking and dragging, and you may copy it into the clipboard (using the Copy command from the Edit menu) for use in another application.
You may also save the article in an individual file, by choosing "Save" from the File menu, or you can append it to a file with the Append command. Append will attach the current article onto the end of a file with the same name as the group that you are reading.
