AMB: The Ancient Machine Book Format

amb.osdn.io

39 points·snvzz··9 comments

Encountered this through a new video[0] in the FreeDOS youtube channel.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdfJrApA560

I started off hating this, but after watching the youtube video, I came around.

It is actually very well thought out for authoring on old machines, not just for rendering/reading.

Embedding the “title” into the header is, in my opinion, a mistake. The header should just say what count of bytes of the prefix of the document are the title (with zero padding); that lets variable-width data be variable, and fixed-width data be fixed.

Looks better than man pages! I always wondered why Linux never got a more modern, GUI driven, and globally searchable offline help system.

That exists for man pages. There are programs that will parse them into html (e.g. man2html) so you can locally browse them. There are GUI programs (e.g. seeman) that allow you to view them in a way very similar to man pages.

See https://man.archlinux.org/ for how you can make man-pages look real nice when converted to html.

I like that the man system is frontend agnostic tho - I don't want to deal with remote desktop when sshed into a server.

KDE had an offline manpage HTML renderer for decades. Instead of "man gcc" you just typed "help:/gcc" into KDEs default web browser, Konqueror. And this still works today. The manpages look as beautiful as the given example above.

Man pages can reflow their contents and their layout isn't done by absolute positioning of characters in a fixed 78-character line.

This AMB thing isn't better than man pages.

Didn't it? I thought there's this mythical texinfo system referred to by every other Linux manpage for details.

No Emacs mode?

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