Documenting the Amigaguide docs...

AROS supports almost everything that AmigaOS 3.1 supported (and a little more ;) ), and for that reason it has always relied on the Amiga sources for available documentation.
These includes Arrex (Rexx in AROS), installer script syntax and amigaguide basic doc structure and tags.

As it's widely known there's been a few twists, AROS has surpassed the original intents in some areas and dedicates documentation is now needed (as referred in my last post in this blog).
But my work on the AROS manuals has to be transposed to something that is readable in AROS. So the logical step is to provide the manuals in a hypertext document type that is readable by AROS.

In theory it should pose no prob as one of the major changes in v3.0+ AmigaOS was the introduction of datatypes. A recognizable file by the datatypes can be read and shared (up to some extent) by the AROS core libraries and tasks. And like AmigaOS, AROS offers a client tool for reading the files supported through datatypes - Multiview.

AROS supports two major hypertext docs through the use of datatypes. HTML and AmigaGuide.
Naturally the HTML would be the AROS natural choice, since there's already some documentation in this format. But the html.datatype does not offer fully support of HTML tags.

Amigaguide documentation is our other option, and to tell the truth a much better one. Supporting the V40 (3.1) tags, it's capable of doing all the basic HTML offerings and with a much better support of AROS specific features. Features such as running rexx scripts, runing other background tasks... (Example: you can have a help file stating that the X tool does the job y with a link that allows running the actual tool).
Besides it's a more natively environment integrated than html which tries to be as open to different env. formats as possible...

The only complaint i have is not being able to offer some form of embedded datatype support. This would make possible to include image files in a contextual manner to the text, helping to illustrate the text.
And the pen color control sticks to V2.0 intuition drawinfo structure (That means that you can only alter the background and foreground text color to the available drawinfo predefined colours - usually grey, black, white and blue...). A RGB type color changer would be nice (I wonder if there were changes in the 3.5, 3.9 and 4.0 amigaguide tags?)...

Also found a bug on the @font tag that ruins the most simple text formating possibility.

So I'll be trying to document the Amigaguide tags so that this documentation starts having more use!... Also KeenEars had the same idea regarding this - see AROS-EXEC post .