Create DOS ebooks using AMB

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:

Here's my article at Technically We Write about how to use AMB:

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Standard comment rules apply.

[kjyu]

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]

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

[mrpix]

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

[hadairodaocer]

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.

[tibfulv]

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.

[platoek]

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.

[ahmad-murery]

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!

[reneschmidt]

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

[rithessa]

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?

[OpenGLever]

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?

[DanielLenskiy]

In my humble opinion, best format for ebooks is FB2

[massadkernel]

So this is where HTML has originated From