How to use TV Agent
TV Agent displays the details of up to date listings, highlighting the
programs you've told it you are interested in, and deleting listings you
don't want to see.

┌──────────┐
│   Help   │
└──────────┘
Almost all forms have explanations which you see by clicking on the Help
button or typing ALT-H. Most of the explanations are just one screen long.
There are two long explanations - this one, and several you'll see when
you ask for help while looking at the listings. If you want to get a
printed copy of all the help files, you will be able to request that on
the form following this help file.

┌──────────┐
│  Set Up  │
└──────────┘
The first time you use TV Agent, use Set Up to make the listings appear
for your local time if you don't live in the Eastern Time Zone. Set Up is
also the way to delete channels you don't receive, if you want to delete
them for all users at once. You can also set your computer's date and time
here.

┌──────────┐
│  Users   │
└──────────┘
The Users button will let you add your name to the list of users so your
personal preferences can be saved. One person may set up several user
names for different purposes. Everytime you enter TV Agent you will have
to select your user name from the list, or enter it as part of the command
line like
C:\TVAGENT> tvagent joe
if "joe" is one of the user names which you have already set up. Except
for "Set Up" functions TV Agent can not do anything without knowing which
user is current, so until you specify a user the buttons for seeing
listings are disabled (they look gray on the screen). When you have
selected a user, there is a separate Set Up button on the User form that
lets you set a couple of options that will apply to only that user. After
you return from the User form the listings buttons will be enabled.

               ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐
Listings       │ Current  │ │ Tomorrow │ │  Print   │ │  Other   │
               └──────────┘ └──────────┘ └──────────┘ └──────────┘
Every day starting at about 2 PM EST your BBS provides listings for
today and the following 7 days. The listings you get today for tomorrow's
programs include schedule changes that were made as late as yesterday.
Details like episode descriptions or talk show guests that are not settled
in time for printed guides, or which would take up too much printed space,
are often available from your BBS. You can choose to see all the
details available, for all the listings available, but the major benefit
of TV Agent comes from eliminating listings you are not interested in.
That way what remains does not take long for you to read. You can print
all the listings you see, but the best way to use TV Agent is to hilite on
the screen listings you are particularly interested in, and then print
only the hilited listings.

At first you will see ALL the listings that are available. New channels
will be added and new locations for old programming services will be
updated as soon as your BBS knows. You can delete listings by
channel, by title or by type. You can hilite program titles or types or
channels you are particularly interested in, and TV Agent will show them
hilited whenever they appear. You can also hilite or delete a particular
listing without affecting future listings. When you are actually looking
at listings more help is available describing how to hilite and delete.

You may only need the "Current" "Tomorrow" and "Print" buttons on the
Main Menu. When you put a user name on the command line starting TV Agent,
the "Current" button is pushed automatically and you are quickly looking
at the listings for programs that are about to start. You can back up to
see what is on now. Look thru the listings as far as you want, or jump
around with the function keys.

If you push the "Tomorrow" button you can move around the listings in
exactly the same way. The only difference is that you will start at the
listing for midnight tonight rather than starting at the current time.
As you look thru the listings, hilite listings that interest you by
hitting the "+" key (or INS or ENTER key). With the LEFT and RIGHT keys
you can focus on the channel, type, or title and hilite just that field.
When you hilite a field it will show up hilited whenever it appears again.
You delete listings in the same way, with the "-" key (or DEL key). If you
focus on a field and delete the entry in that field (the channel, type, or
title) no listings with that entry will show up in the future. Use the "?"
key (or "/" or "5") to see more details of a listing.

When you push the "Print" button the hilited listings for tomorrow will be
printed. If you have not hilited anything, nothing will print. If you are
in a hurry and you have already hilited the programs you are interested in
by their channel, type, or title, you can skip the step of looking at the
listings on screen and go straight to the step of pushing the "Print"
button. (But if you do that you will miss listings for new series or
specials that you could not have hilited in advance.) You can not hilite
or delete or see details while you are printing because TV Agent does not
stop the display until it reaches the end point - the listings just scroll
on by on screen without you hitting a key. You can interrupt the printing
by hitting ESC or "Q".

Sometimes you may want to use the "Other" button to do something that
won't happen with the "Current" "Tomorrow" or "Print" buttons. For
instance you may want to print the hilites for the whole rest of the week;
or you may want to print listings for some period whether they are hilited
or not; or you may want to see only hilited listings on the screen. The
"Other" button will present you with a form on which you specify the
starting point, the stopping point, whether to show all listings or only
hilited listings, and whether to print.

Strategy for hiliting and deleting fields and lines =====================

When you are looking at listings, hit H for help and you will find more
detailed help about what kinds of deletions and hilites you can make.

"Hiliting" and "deleting" are the ways you tell TV Agent your preferences.
You hilite a listing by hitting the "+" key or the ENTER key, and it then
shows up on the screen in reversed print, like it has a yellow band behind
it. (Listings that have not been hilited are in yellow print on a blue
background.) You delete a listing by hitting the "-" or DELETE key, and it
then shows up with red print on a black background. Hilited listings stand
out whenever they appear on the screen so you will be sure to notice them.
Deleted listings don't appear at all - once they scroll off the screen,
you can go back over the same time period and they will not appear.

Both hiliting and deleting can be done on either a whole listing or on one
field of the listing. When you hilite a whole listing, the yellow band
appears behind the entire line on the screen. This sort of hiliting does
not affect any other listing. If you delete a whole listing, the entire
line shows up red on black, and that listing will disappear when it
scrolls off; but deleting a whole listing does not affect any other
listing - so if you delete a whole line listing "Sesame Street" at 4 PM it
will appear again in tomorrow's listings.

When you hilite one of the three fields (channel, type, or title) the
yellow band appears only behind that field. Field hilites affect all the
listings you have received and all the listings you ever will receive from
your BBS (unless you undo the hilite later.) For instance if you
hilite once the title field on a listing where the title is "NOVA" then
whenever a listing appears with the title "NOVA" the title will show up
hilited, no matter what channel it appears on. If you delete the title
field on a listing with the title "Sesame Street" then the title field
will show up with red print on a black background while that listing is on
the screen. But when it scrolls off the screen it will not scroll back on
if you try to go back to it, and no listings with that title will appear
again.

The more deleting you do, the less time you will waste passing over
listings for channels you don't receive or for programs you are not
interested in. You only have to tell TV Agent once that you don't get
ESPN G5-9, and all those listings will never be displayed. If you know
that you don't want to see ANY episodes of "Laverne and Shirley", tell TV
Agent that the first time one appears. Or any time you see a listing for a
program type (eg DAYTIME SOAP or GAME SHOW) that you know you will never
be interested in, tell TV Agent to stop listing any programs with that
type. You can also delete channels you don't receive at the System Set Up
form, so they will automatically be deleted for all users at this site.

The more hiliting you do the closer TV Agent can come to finding your
preferences automatically. If you wanted listings for the same set of
programs every week and you hilited those titles for one week, you would
never have to look at other listings again because TV Agent could print
out only those hilited titles whenever they appear in future BBS
downloads.

Most people will look at the listings before TV Agent prints them. That
way you will see your favorite programs with their title fields hilited,
and you might add whole line hilites to particular episodes of other
titles. You might also remove the hilite from a particular episode without
affecting the hilite on the series. And you might see new titles you want
to hilite.

You can print one listing at a time as you come to it, showing just its
date and time, channel, program type, title, and duration; or showing all
the details known about it. When you are satisfied that all the listings
you want to be reminded of (during a day, or a week, or whatever period
you choose) are hilited, tell TV Agent to print only the hilited listings
from that period.

You may want to set up one user with your name and your preferences, and
also set up other user names for special purposes. For instance you could
have a user name "EDUCATIONAL" and the only hilites it has are field
hilites on the channel field when the channel is PBS or TLC or DISC. When
you print the hilited listings for that user you will be getting a
complete program schedule for those channels. You could have another user
who has hilites only on the program types "MOVIE" and "TV MOVIE", to get a
list of movies. If you want to check on whether a particular program will
be repeated during the week you could hilite only that title for a
temporary user.

With this early version of TV Agent you may not want to do whole line
hilites many days in advance. If today is Tuesday and you got the latest
listings from your BBS today, you might want to stop hiliting and
deleting particular listings at the end of Wednesday's listings. This is
because if you get more listings from your BBS tomorrow (Wednesday)
you will be getting a fresher version of the schedule for Thursday. If you
hilite or delete particular listings in Thursday's schedule today
(Tuesday) those whole line hilites and deletions will be lost when (on
Wednesday) you get the new Thursday schedule. You will NOT lose hilites
and deletions of fields - the channel, type or title hilites can be done
as far in advance as you want. Hiliting and deleting whole lines may still
be something you want to do, if for instance you routinely only look at
the listings on Sunday and you mark and print the whole week at once. If
you do hilite or delete a whole line beyond the end of the fresh listings
TV Agent will warn you, once.

Receiving listings files from your BBS ============================

If you want to get all the listings that are available, mark all the files
you see named like TVLIST01.ARC, TVLIST02.ARC, ... TVLIST31.ARC for
downloading from your BBS. The number in the filename is the day of
the month contained in the listings. Eight files (two of them new) will be
available each day about 2 PM. [ In the future the listings might be put
in the datastream as early as 6 AM (noon on weekends.) ] If today is
Monday the 15th of the month, TVLIST15.ARC will contain the listings for
the current day. TVLIST16.ARC contains newly updated listings for
tomorrow. TVLIST22.ARC will contain listings for the Monday one week
later. That file will be transmitted for the first time on the 15th, then
again on the 16th, 17th, and every day until it is replaced with an
updated TVLIST22 on the 21st. (The listings run from midnight to 11:59 PM
EASTERN time. If you are in the Pacific time zone, the first listing in
the TVLIST16.ARC file will be for 9 PM Pacific time on the night of the
15th. If you are in the Atlantic time zone, the first listing in
TVLIST16.ARC will be for 1 AM the morning of the 16th.)

If you don't have much disk space, you do not have to get all eight days
listings; each day takes about 300,000 bytes of disk space after TV Agent
unzips it. TV Agent will work with whatever days you have and
automatically deletes files for listings of days that have passed. To
minimize the disk space used for listings, you could mark only tomorrow's
file (TVLIST02.ARC if today is the first of the month) for reception, and
still see all the listings for today and tomorrow. (You do not have to
mark TVLIST01.ARC if you received it yesterday.) The advantage of
receiving all the listings available is that you can look at listings for
the day after tomorrow, and the whole week, if you have received all the
listings. Even if you only call your BBS once a week, on
whatever day you choose, you will still get listings for the whole week,
if download all of the eight files that are available.

======================  END  OF  HELP  ==================================
