Create DOS ebooks using AMB

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AMB stands for Ancient Machine Book, and is basically an ebook file format for low memory systems like DOS. Mateusz Viste developed AMB - and I really like it.
Writing ebooks in AMB is pretty easy, so let's take a look at how to do it.
AMB is basically a container with a bunch of AMA source files, packed together using an open source program called AMBPACK that you can download from Mateusz's website.
Read more at the AMB website:
amb.osdn.io/
Here's my article at Technically We Write about how to use AMB:
technicallywewrite.com/2023/07/11/amb
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Опубликовано:

5 авг 2023

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Комментарии : 30

@kjyu4539 Год назад

i thank u for creating free dos u r a good man glad to see u healthy and active i think free/open source software and all those guys are one of the most heartwarming achievements of the humanity in the entire history i thank God

@patrick-aka-patski Год назад

Like it. Reminds me a bit of past days when I used MS Word for DOS.

@mrpix3011 Год назад

Nice video. Thank you. Do you recall any "MSDOS powerpoint"?

@KenKeenan1973 Год назад

The most popular presentation software for DOS in the 80s was probably Harvard Graphics en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics

@eduardof.2802 Год назад

Harvard Graphics was very popular before PowerPoint…

@RiceDummy8 Год назад

good tutorial!

@freedosproject Год назад

Glad it was helpful!

@hadairodaocer Год назад

This is such a cool format! I think I'm gonna convert my own books to it and release it on my site. It looks very easy to convert to.

@freedosproject Год назад

Go for it!

@amoledzeppelin 7 месяцев назад

@@freedosproject I think I'm gonna convert my poetry collection into it. But I need something with UTF-8 and Linux support. Maybe will write it myself if I don't find anything.

@StevenTremblay-v5p 2 месяца назад

Very cool 👍

@ernietech-101 Год назад

Very interesting

@plato4ek Год назад

I really like your videos on using text-mode DOS/Unix tools. Especially those on text/data processing (AMB, roff, As-Easy-As for spreadsheets), and programming (the info about how to use compilers and nuances of languages, mostly). Maybe it's not very useful these days, like videos about Fortran programming, but it's somehow VERY interesting and gives a taste of history. Please, keep going! BTW, have you done any disassembling/debugging? If yes, that's an idea for a video.

@freedosproject Год назад

Glad you like the videos on FORTRAN programming and Unix history - I'll keep doing them. Maybe not every week, but there's more to come.

@tibfulv Год назад

There's apparently also groff/cawf in the gnuish repository , if anyone wants to make Unix-style manpages. groff will support full andoc, while cawf will have to be tested.

@freedosproject Год назад

We also have an "nro" package in FreeDOS - but it's not used (and not exactly request compatible with Unix nroff) so we may remove it in a later version.

@reneschmidt8000 Год назад

Simple and good enough for help files. Tho, is there a good markdown viewer for dos?

@OpenGL4ever Год назад

Not that I know of. But at least there is an HTML viewer. DOS has the problem that pure DOS applications that are supposed to run on very old DOS computers are usually limited to real mode. And so you have a very limited memory and only 64 KiB large segments. So if you want to open text files that are larger than 64 KiB, you have to workaround that limit as programmer. The early versions of Notepad are thus limited to 64 KiB. There are 32-bit DOS extenders that make protected mode available, but you need at least a 386 for this.

@rithessa 7 месяцев назад

AMB has quickly become my favorite tool to work with on FreeDOS, been compiling a lot of writing with it recently. Anyone know if there are repositories of others' AMB creations?

@freedosproject 7 месяцев назад

I don't know of any, but I'd love to hear if there are! If there's an archive somewhere, LMK and I'll make a news post or link or something from the FreeDOS website.

@ahmad-murery Год назад

Very nice, I actually prefer writing ebooks using AMB over a hi tech word processors where your main focus is on the content (or maybe I'm too old now and that big font and blue screen makes feel comfortable). Thanks Jim!

@OpenGL4ever Год назад

AMB does have no real Unicode support. It can only map 128 Unicode characters to the unicode character set on a modern machine, but not more. It also does not support colored text. If you ask me, AMB might be fine for projects like FreeDOS and old machines, but for modern machines a modern ebook format like epub is the much better option. And for simple stuff you can use markdown or simple text files.

@ahmad-murery Год назад

@@OpenGL4ever I know that, I usually use notepad++ (in markdown format) to take notes and prepare my content, after that depending on the project I'm working on I either convert it to HTML or MSWord doc. anyway, when I remember that a lot of businesses were successful using simple tools like this one, it's really a mind blowing. One more thing is that I used to do a lot of BASIC programming in the past and I love that blue screen 😎 Thanks

@OpenGL4ever Год назад

@@ahmad-murery You can have this bluescreen in every feature rich editor. notepad++ can do this too you just have to change your colors and know your tools.

@DanielLenskiy Год назад

In my humble opinion, best format for ebooks is FB2

@OpenGL4ever Год назад

I have read the document of AMB a few months ago. As far as i know, AMB files should have a limit of 78 characters per line to leave space for scrollbars. What does happen if you create a AMA file with a longer line? Will ambpack print a warning message or an error message or will it truncate or wrap the line?

@freedosproject Год назад

Any lines longer than 78 characters will just get cut off (not wrapped) after the 78th character. It's because the AMB viewer has a scroll bar on the right and a frame on the left (80 columns, minus 1 col scroll bar, minus 1 col frame = 78 display columns).

@OpenGL4ever Год назад

@@freedosproject Thank you for your answer.