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<h1>FORM-BASED OPTIONS MENU : HELP</h1>
<p>The Options Menu allows you to set and modify many Lynx
features.<br>
Note: some options appear on the screen only if they have been
compiled in or chosen in `lynx.cfg':</p>
<ul>
<li>General Preferences
<ul>
<li><a href="#UM">User Mode</a></li>
<li><a href="#ED">Editor</a></li>
<li><a href="#ST">Searching type</a></li>
<li><a href="#CK">Cookies</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Keyboard Input
<ul>
<li><a href="#KM">Keypad mode</a></li>
<li><a href="#EM">Emacs keys</a></li>
<li><a href="#VI">VI keys</a></li>
<li><a href="#LE">Line edit style</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Display and Character Set
<ul>
<li><a href="#DC">Display Character set</a></li>
<li><a href="#AD">Assumed document character set</a></li>
<li><a href="#JK">Raw 8-bit or CJK mode</a></li>
<li><a href="#DV">X DISPLAY variable</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Document Appearance
<ul>
<li><a href="#SC">Show color</a></li>
<li><a href="#CL">Show cursor for current link or
option</a></li>
<li><a href="#PU">Pop-ups for select fields</a></li>
<li><a href="#tagsoup">HTML error recovery</a></li>
<li><a href="#SI">Show Images</a></li>
<li><a href="#VB">Verbose Images</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Headers Transferred to Remote Servers
<ul>
<li><a href="#PM">Personal Mail Address</a></li>
<li><a href="#PC">Preferred Document Charset</a></li>
<li><a href="#PL">Preferred Document Language</a></li>
<li><a href="#UA">User Agent</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Listing and Accessing Files
<ul>
<li><a href="#FT">FTP sort criteria</a></li>
<li><a href="#LD">Local directory sort criteria</a></li>
<li><a href="#DF">Show dot files</a></li>
<li><a href="#LL">Execution links</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Special Files and Screens
<ul>
<li><a href="#MB">Multi-bookmarks</a></li>
<li><a href="#BF">Bookmark file</a></li>
<li><a href="#VP">Visited Pages</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h1><a name="CK">Cookies</a></h1>
<p>This can be set to accept or reject all cookies or to ask each
time. See the Users Guide for details of <a href=
"../Lynx_users_guide.html#Cookies">cookie usage</a>.</p>
<h1><a name="ED">Editor</a></h1>
<p>This is the editor to be invoked when editing browsable files,
sending mail or comments, or filling form's textarea (multiline
input field). The full pathname of the editor command should be
specified when possible. It is assumed the text editor supports
the same character set you have for "display character set" in
Lynx.</p>
<h1><a name="EM">Emacs keys</a></h1>
<p>If set to 'ON' then the CTRL-P, CTRL-N, CTRL-F and CTRL-B keys
will be mapped to up-arrow, down-arrow, right-arrow and
left-arrow respectively. Otherwise, they remain mapped to their
configured bindings (normally UP_TWO lines, DOWN_TWO lines,
NEXT_PAGE and PREV_PAGE respectively).</p>
<p>Note: setting emacs keys does not affect the line-editor
bindings.</p>
<h1><a name="LL">Execution links</a></h1>
<p>If set to 'ALWAYS ON', Lynx will locally execute commands
contained inside any links. This can be HIGHLY DANGEROUS, so it
is recommended that they remain 'ALWAYS OFF' or 'FOR LOCAL FILES
ONLY'.</p>
<h1><a name="KM">Keypad mode</a></h1>
<p>This gives the choice between navigating with the keypad (as
arrows; see Lynx Navigation) and having every link numbered
(numbered links) so that the links may be selected by numbers
instead of moving to them with the arrow keys. You can also
number form fields.</p>
<h1><a name="LE">Line edit style</a></h1>
<p>This allows you to set alternate key bindings for the built-in
line editor, if <a href="alt_edit_help.html">Alternate
Bindings</a> have been installed. Otherwise, Lynx uses the
<a href="edit_help.html">Default Binding</a>.</p>
<h1><a name="PM">Personal Mail Address</a></h1>
<p>You may set your mail address here so that when mailing
messages to other people or mailing files to yourself, your email
address can be automatically filled in. Your email address will
also be sent to HTTP servers in a `from:' field.</p>
<h1><a name="PU">Pop-ups for select fields</a></h1>
<p>Lynx normally uses a pop-up window for the OPTIONs in form
SELECT fields when the field does not have the MULTIPLE attribute
specified, and thus only one OPTION can be selected. The use of
pop-up windows can be disabled by changing this setting to OFF,
in which case the OPTIONs will be rendered as a list of radio
buttons. Note that if the SELECT field does have the MULTIPLE
attribute specified, the OPTIONs always are rendered as a list of
checkboxes.</p>
<h1><a name="ST">Searching type</a></h1>
<p>If set to 'case sensitive', user searches invoked by '/' will
be case-sensitive substring searches. Default is 'Case
Insensitive'.</p>
<h1><a name="SC">Show color</a></h1>
<p>This will be present if color support is available.</p>
<ul>
<li>If set to ON or ALWAYS, color mode will be forced on if
possible. If (n)curses color support is available but cannot be
used for the current terminal type, selecting ON is rejected
with a message.</li>
<li>If set to OFF or NEVER, color mode will be turned off.</li>
<li>ALWAYS and NEVER are not offered in anonymous accounts. If
saved to a '.lynxrc' file in non-anonymous accounts, ALWAYS
will cause Lynx to set color mode on at startup if
supported.</li>
</ul>If Lynx is built with slang, this is equivalent to having
included the -color command line switch or having the COLORTERM
environment variable set. If color support is provided by curses
or ncurses, this is equivalent to the default behavior of using
color when the terminal type supports it. If (n)curses color
support is available but cannot be used for the current terminal
type, the preference can still be saved but will have no effect.
<p>A saved value of NEVER will cause Lynx to assume a monochrome
terminal at start-up. It is similar to the -nocolor switch, but
(when the slang library is used) can be overridden with the
-color switch. If the setting is OFF or ON when the current
options are saved to a '.lynxrc' file, the default start-up
behavior is retained, such that color mode will be turned on at
startup only if the terminal info indicates that you have a
color-capable terminal, or (when slang is used) if forced on via
the -color switch or COLORTERM variable. This default behavior
always is used in anonymous accounts, or if the 'option'_save
restriction is set explicitly. If for any reason the start-up
color mode is incorrect for your terminal, set it appropriately
on or off via this option.</p>
<h1><a name="CL">Show cursor for current link or option</a></h1>
<p>Lynx normally hides the cursor by positioning it to the right
and if possible the very bottom of the screen, so that the
current link or OPTION is indicated solely by its highlighting or
color. If show cursor is set to ON, the cursor will be positioned
at the left of the current link or OPTION. This is helpful when
Lynx is being used with a speech or braille interface. It is also
useful for sighted users when the terminal cannot distinguish the
character attributes used to distinguish the current link or
OPTION from the others in the display.</p>
<h1><a name="UM">User Mode</a></h1>
<dl>
<dt><em>Novice</em>: Shows 2 extra lines of help at the bottom
of the screen for beginners.</dt>
<dt><em>Intermediate (normal)</em>: Normal status-line messages
appear.</dt>
<dt><em>Advanced</em>: The URL is shown on the status
line.</dt>
</dl>
<h1><a name="AD">Assumed document character set</a></h1>
<p>This changes the handling of documents which do not explicitly
specify a charset. Normally Lynx assumes that 8-bit characters in
those documents are encoded according to iso-8859-1 (the official
default for HTTP protocol). Unfortunately, many non-English web
pages forget to include proper charset info; this option helps
you browse those broken pages if you know somehow what the
charset is. When the value given here or by an -assume_charset
command-line flag is in effect, Lynx will treat documents as if
they were encoded accordingly. Option is active when 'Raw 8-bit
or CJK Mode' is OFF.</p>
<h1><a name="JK">Raw 8-bit or CJK mode</a></h1>
<p>This is set automatically, but can be toggled manually in
certain cases: it toggles whether 8-bit characters are assumed to
correspond with the display character set and therefore are
processed without translation via the chartrans conversion
tables. ON by default when the display character set is one of
the Asian (CJK) sets and the 8-bit characters are Kanji
multibytes. OFF for the other display character sets, but can be
turned ON when the document's charset is unknown (e.g., is not
ISO-8859-1 and no charset parameter was specified in a reply
header from an HTTP server to indicate what it is), but you have
no better idea than viewing it as from display character set (see
'assumed document character set' for best choice). Should be OFF
when an Asian (CJK) set is selected but the document is
ISO-8859-1 or another 'assumed document character set'. The
setting can also be toggled via the RAW_TOGGLE command, normally
mapped to '@', and at startup via the -raw switch.</p>
<h1><a name="tagsoup">HTML error recovery</a></h1>
<p>Lynx often has to deal with invalid HTML markup. It always
tries to recover from errors, but there is no universally correct
way for doing this. As a result, there are two parsing modes:
"<dfn>SortaSGML</dfn>" attempts to enforce valid nesting of most
tags at an earlier stage of processing, while
"<dfn>TagSoup</dfn>" relies more on the HTML rendering stage to
mimic the behavior of some other browsers. You can also switch
between these modes with the CTRL-V key, and the default can be
changed in lynx.cfg or with the -tagsoup command line switch.</p>
<p>The "SortaSGML" mode will often appear to be more strict, and
makes some errors apparent that are otherwise unnoticeable. One
particular difference is the handling of block elements or
<li>..</li> inside <a
HREF="some.url">..</a>. Invalid nesting like this may
turn anchors into hidden links which cannot be easily followed,
this is avoided in "TagSoup" mode. See the <a href=
"follow_help.html">help on following links by number</a> for more
information on hidden links. Often pages may be more readable in
"TagSoup" mode, but sometimes the opposite is true. Most
documents with valid HTML, and documents with only minor errors,
should be rendered the same way in both modes.</p>
<p>If you are curious about what goes on behind the scenes, but
find that the information from the -trace switch is just too
much, Lynx can be started with the -preparsed switch; going into
SOURCE mode ('\' key) and toggling the parsing mode (with CTRL-V)
should then show some of the differences. <!--
LP's version - for reference - TD
While the proper HTML markup should be canonical, badly nested HTML pages
may be recovered in different ways. There are two error recovery modes
in Lynx: SortaSGML with the recovery at SGML stage and TagSoup mode
with the recovery at HTML parsing stage, the latter gives more
recovery and was the default in Lynx 2.7.2 and before,
and the first may be useful for page validation purposes.
One particular difference is known for <li>..</li>
or similar strong markup inside <a HREF="some.url">..</a>
anchor text - those links are not reachable in SortaSGML
(such markup should be placed outside <a>..</a> indeed).
Default recovery mode can also be switched with CTRL-V key,
from lynx.cfg or command line switch.
--></p>
<h1><a name="SI">Show Images</a></h1>
<p>This option combines the effects of the `*' & `[' keys as
follows:</p>
<pre>
<em>ignore</em> all images which lack an ALT= text string,
<em>show labels</em>, e.g. [INLINE] — see `Verbose Images' below — ,
<em>use links</em> for every image, enabling downloading.
</pre>
<p>This option setting cannot be saved between sessions. See
<a href="../Lynx_users_guide.html#Images">Users Guide</a> &
<em>lynx.cfg</em> for more details.</p>
<h1><a name="VB">Verbose Images</a></h1>
<p>This allows you to replace [LINK], [INLINE] and [IMAGE] — for
images without ALT — with filenames: this can be helpful by
revealing which images are important & which are merely
decoration, e.g. <em>button.gif</em>, <em>line.gif</em>. See
<a href="../Lynx_users_guide.html#Images">Users Guide</a> &
<em>lynx.cfg</em> for more details.</p>
<h1><a name="VI">VI keys</a></h1>
<p>If set to 'ON' then the lowercase h, j, k and l keys will be
mapped to left-arrow, down-arrow, up-arrow and right-arrow
respectively.</p>
<p>The uppercase H, J, K, and L keys remain mapped to their
configured bindings (normally HELP, JUMP, KEYMAP and LIST,
respectively).</p>
<p>Note: setting vi keys does not affect the line-editor
bindings.</p>
<h1><a name="DC">Display Character set</a></h1>
<p>This allows you to set up the default character set for your
specific terminal. The display character set provides a mapping
from the character encodings of viewed documents and from HTML
entities into viewable characters. It should be set according to
your terminal's character set so that characters other than 7-bit
ASCII can be displayed correctly, using approximations if
necessary, <a href="test_display.html">try the test here</a>.
Since Lynx now supports a wide range of platforms it may be
useful to note that cpXXX codepages are used within IBM PC
computers, and windows-xxxx within native MS-Windows
applications.</p>
<h1><a name="DV">X DISPLAY variable</a></h1>
<p>This option is only relevant to X Window users. It specifies
the DISPLAY (Unix) or DECW$DISPLAY (VMS) variable. It is picked
up automatically from the environment if it has been previously
set.</p>
<h1><a name="MB">Multi-bookmarks</a></h1>
<p>Manage multiple bookmark files:</p>
<ul>
<li>When OFF, the default bookmark file is used for the
'v'iew-bookmarks and 'a'dd-bookmark link commands.</li>
<li>If set to STANDARD, a menu of available bookmarks is always
invoked when you seek to view a bookmark file or add a link,
and you select the bookmark file by its letter token in that
menu.</li>
<li>If set to ADVANCED, you are instead prompted for the letter
of the desired bookmark file, but can enter '=' to invoke the
STANDARD selection menu, or RETURN for the default bookmark
file.</li>
</ul>
<h1><a name="BF">Bookmark file</a></h1>
<p>Manage the default bookmark file:</p>
<ul>
<li>If non-empty and multi-bookmarks is OFF, it specifies your
default '<a href="bookmark_help.html">Bookmark file</a>'.</li>
<li>If multi-bookmarks is STANDARD or ADVANCED, entering 'B'
will invoke a menu in which you can specify filepaths and
descriptions of up to 26 bookmark files.</li>
</ul>The filepaths must be from your home directory and begin
with './' if subdirectories are included (e.g.,
'./BM/lynx_bookmarks.html').
<p>Lynx will create bookmark files when you first 'a'dd a link,
but any subdirectories in the filepath must already exist.</p>
<h1><a name="VP">Visited Pages</a></h1>
<p>This allows you to change the appearance of the <a href=
"visited_help.html">Visited Links Page</a> Normally it shows a
list, in reverse order of the pages visited. The popup menu
allows you these choices:</p>
<dl>
<dt><em>By First Visit</em>: The default appearance, shows the
pages based on when they were first visited. The list is shown
in reverse order, to make the current page (usually) at the top
of the list.</dt>
<dt><em>By First Visit Reversed</em> The default appearance,
shows the pages based on when they were first visited. The list
is shown in order, to make the current page (usually) at the
bottom of the list.</dt>
<dt><em>As Visit Tree</em> Combines the first/last visited
information, showing the list in order of the first visit, but
using the indentation level of the page immediately previous to
determine indentation of new entries. That gives a clue to the
order of visiting pages when moving around in the History or
Visited Pages lists.</dt>
<dt><em>By Last Visit</em> The default appearance, shows the
pages based on when they were last visited. The list is shown
in reverse order, to make the current page (usually) at the top
of the list.</dt>
<dt><em>By Last Visit Reversed</em> The default appearance,
shows the pages based on when they were last visited. The list
is shown in order, to make the current page (usually) at the
bottom of the list.</dt>
</dl>
<h1><a name="FT">FTP sort criteria</a></h1>
<p>This allows you to specify how files will be sorted within FTP
listings. The current options include `By Filename',
`By Size', `By Type', `By Date'.</p>
<h1><a name="LD">List directory style</a></h1>
<p>Applies to Directory Editing. Files and directories can be
presented in the following ways:</p>
<dl>
<dt><em>Mixed style</em>: Files and directories are listed
together in alphabetical order.</dt>
<dt><em>Directories first</em>: Files and directories are
separated into 2 alphabetical lists: directories are listed
first.</dt>
<dt><em>Files first</em>: Files and directories are separated
into 2 alphabetical lists: files are listed first.</dt>
</dl>
<h1><a name="DF">Show dot files</a></h1>
<p>If display/creation of hidden (dot) files/directories is
enabled, you can turn the feature on or off via this setting.</p>
<h1><a name="PC">Preferred Document Charset</a></h1>
<p>The character set you prefer if sets in addition to ISO-8859-1
and US-ASCII are available from servers. Use MIME notation (e.g.,
ISO-8859-2) and do not include ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII, since
those values are always assumed by default. Can be a
comma-separated list, which may be interpreted by servers as
descending order of preferences; you can make your order of
preference explicit by using `q factors' as defined by the HTTP
protocol, for servers which understand it: e.g., <kbd>iso-8859-5,
utf-8;q=0.8</kbd>.</p>
<h1><a name="PL">Preferred Document Language</a></h1>
<p>The language you prefer if multi-language files are available
from servers. Use RFC 1766 tags, e.g., `en' English, `fr' French.
Can be a comma-separated list, and you can use `q factors' (see
previous help item): e.g., <kbd>da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7</kbd>
.</p>
<h1><a name="UA">User Agent</a></h1>
<p>The header string which Lynx sends to servers to indicate the
User-Agent is displayed here. Changes may be disallowed via the
-restrictions switch. Otherwise, the header can be changed
temporarily to e.g., L_y_n_x/2.8.3 for access to sites which
discriminate against Lynx based on checks for the presence of
`Lynx' in the header. If changed during a Lynx session, the
default User-Agent header can be restored by deleting the
modified string in the Options Menu. Whenever the User-Agent
header is changed, the current document is reloaded, with the
no-cache flags set, on exit from Options Menu. Changes of the
header are not saved in the .lynxrc file.</p>
<p>NOTE Netscape Communications Corp. has claimed that false
transmissions of `Mozilla' as the User-Agent are a copyright
infringement, which will be prosecuted. DO NOT misrepresent Lynx
as Mozilla. The Options Menu issues a warning about possible
copyright infringement whenever the header is changed to one
which does not include `Lynx' or `lynx'.</p>
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