Viewing topics in the Internal Viewer

In the first section of this tutorial, you started up Callisto, opened the example document, and watched as Callisto began to read topics from the bulletin boards.  In this section you will view the topics which it has read and stored in the Callisto forums.

Contents

1. the Callisto forums
2. viewing the New Articles forum in the Internal Viewer
3. viewing a topic
4. viewing the home page of a forum or bulletin board
5. other operations in the Internal Viewer
6. summary

1: the Callisto forums

Remember that Callisto forums are used to store and organise the lists of topics which Callisto has found.  You can define as many Callisto forums as you need and store topics from more than one bulletin board in a single Callisto forum (we'll go into this in detail in a later tutorial).  Like bulletin boards Callisto forums can be grouped together in folders, as we have done with the example document:

At first sight, this may look a little daunting and your own Callisto documents will probably be a little simpler (at least at first!).

To keep things simple, for now we'll concentrate on the New Articles forum, which Callisto creates automatically for every document (along with the Tracked Articles and Saved Articles forums that will be covered in later tutorials).  All the topics that Callisto finds are stored in the New Articles forum, regardless of which other Callisto forums you choose to store them in.

2: viewing the New Articles forum in the Internal Viewer

Click on the New Articles Callisto forum in the Document Window and then click the Internal Viewer button.  You should see a window something like the illustration below (but the actual topics you see will almost certainly be different as the contents of a bulletin board change over time!):

Callisto stores the following information for each topic:

As shown, the list is ordered by Last Post, but you can change the order by clicking on the column headings - try it!

3: viewing a topic

Remember that Callisto does not actually store the articles that make up a topic - to view the topic, you need to be connected to the Internet.

Select one of the topics in the Internal Viewer by clicking on it and then click the Open Topic button: Callisto should open your browser on the Web page containing the articles of the topic.

Do the same for some of the other topics in the Internal Viewer - notice how Callisto opens a new browser window for each topic.

When you have finished, close the browsers.

4: viewing the home page of a forum or bulletin board

It's just as easy to see the a list of the other topics in the forum in which your selected topic was found: click the Open Forum button instead of Open Topic.  Callisto opens your browser on the home page of the forum.

To see the home page of the bulletin board in which your topic was found, click the Open Board button.

Try this for some of the topics in the internal viewer.

5: other operations in the Internal Viewer

You probably noticed the other buttons in the Internal viewer. They will be covered in more detail in later tutorials, but here is a brief summary of their functions:

6: summary

That completes the basics of using the Internal Viewer to look at the topics in the New Articles Callisto forum.  Viewing the topics in any of the other Callisto forums is just the same.

The next section of this tutorial will cover viewing the topics in a Web Browser.