AmigaGuide is a
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
document file format
A document file format is a text or binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers.
There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.
Examples of XML-based open standards are D ...
designed for the
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
. Files are stored in
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software.
Since
Workbench 2.1 an Amiga Guide system for O.S. inline help files and reading manuals with hypertext formatting elements was launched in AmigaOS and based on a viewer called simply "AmigaGuide" and it has been included as standard feature on the Amiga system. Users with earlier versions of Workbench could view the files by downloading the program and library AmigaGuide 34 distributed with public domain collections of floppy disks (for example on
Fred Fish
Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of freeware Fish disks for the Amiga. The Fish Disks (term coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Gr ...
collection) or it could be downloaded directly from
Aminet
Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web. According to Aminet, as of 3 September 2022, it has 83930 pac ...
software repository.
Starting from AmigaOS 3.0 the AmigaGuide tool was replaced with more the complete and flexible
MultiView.
AmigaGuide and MultiView
AmigaGuide is the default tool for viewing AmigaGuide files used with AmigaOS 2.1, and is also a basic text viewer for ASCII documents. It can handle multiple files thanks to cross-linking tables called XREF.
MultiView is basically a void container and a natural GUI for the various datatypes that open MultiView as a default tool when any media file (including AmigaGuide files) are invoked by mouse clicking and recognized by the existing correspondent datatype.
AmigaGuide readers on various platforms
Although the