Make May AI Data-type month for OS 4

Hi AmigaOS 4 community,

Let's make May a datatype month for AmigaOS 4. I'm calling on those brave members of the AmigaOS 4 to spend some time in May focused on producing, updating, or helping with data types.

The scope would be to develop a new datatype for us, find datatypes on the OS4 Depot, grab and recompile the open-source ones, and modernize the codebase. Of course, not everyone has the skill to write or read code to do these things, but AI can.

I will be using AI tools, and we'll try to create at least one new datatype in May. I would be happy to help others leverage the same tools so they, too, can create new datatypes for the Amiga computer. AI is so powerful. You can ask it to create a datatype that works across all flavors of AmigaOS. My focus is on OS 4, but I welcome anybody who wants to support all Amiga platforms.

Some ideas for new datatypes the Amiga could use include a Markdown data type, a camera RAW datatype, and a datatype supporting popular formats and applications like Microsoft Word. I realize that sounds wild, but the Word format is a published spec. AI could take that spec and create a viewer. I'm sure there are dozens of other datatypes that the Amiga platform could use that we don't currently have.

What I'm asking in this thread is for you to post a message indicating which datatype you want to work on so we don't duplicate efforts, to suggest a new data type the Amiga computer needs, or to offer support and testing for datatypes.

What's out of scope for this thread? Is complaining about datatypes, or about the datatype system not supporting streaming? The goal here is to move the boing ball forward and bring more capabilities to the AmigaOS 4 and other Amiga platforms.

Thoughts?
Bill "tekmage" Borsari

URLs:
https://os4depot.net/index.php?function=browse&cat=datatype
https://os4coding.net/blog/tekmage/will-ai-make-2026-year-amigaos-4

Why only for OS4?

@NinjaCyborg

Do you think he should support Windows, Linux, MacOSX too?
was not the point of using AI lack of time.. to do it all.

@LiveForIt

That's a very stupid thing to say. OS3 has datatypes too after all.

@NinjaCyborg

1) I prefer OS 4
2) Go back and read what I wrote more closely :)

That's an excellent idea. Let's create something, even if it is not based on AI as well. I guess AI usage is not mandatory, is it?

@tekmage

Not sure what, multiview support regarding font size, bold, and italic and so on, while you can read markdown no problem, you might want to generate a image format, to support UTF8 and all the formatting, but that is kind of a memory hungry solution. Or maybe you just want something converts it into ASCII 8bit encoded text, that can be loaded as a readable format without all that.

Maybe a making MD viewer is more appropriate action.
Markdown support URL’s to images and tables, and links to web sites.

Its not a simple project, in particularly if need to display different parts of the documents with different fonts based on UTF8 codes ranges (See the Unicode table). But anyway 50% is better then 0% markdown support.

Not sure what the best approach is, its definitely good idea to have strategy before you start.
Or maybe there is existing project that can be ported over, it can save you lot of hazel.

Reading MD, before reinventing the wheel best to look into following projects.

https://github.com/mity/md4c
https://github.com/commonmark/cmark
https://github.com/goldsborough/markdownpp
https://github.com/litehtml/litehtml

@LiveForIt
Quote:AmigaOS 4.x supports 32 bit Unicode text rendering incl. the usual bold, italic, underline, strike-trough, etc. styles, as well as subpixel rendering (unless the locale is set to USA or Canada or something else where patents regarding it apply and prevented enabling it in AmigaOS).
Check for example my text functions in OWB, using only AmigaOS 4.x functions (diskfont and graphics.library), no external libraries like libfreetype used/required.

Even more than 30 years ago Unicode and outline fonts with all styles were already supported, IIRC since AmigaOS version 2.1, but limited to 16 bit Unicode in the included AGFA Intellifont font engine (bullet.library).
What both AmigaOS 2.1+ and 4.x are missing is support for colour outline fonts. Required for example for current web browsers to display coloured emoji, but for a lot of other use cases the B/W implementations might still be enough.

@joerg

almost forgot Anime datatypes are interactive, mostly use libpng, for image loading, but then again if do load any image, it some old code I wrote years ago.

@walkero

My selfish goal is to get more folks, like me who are not developers to embrace AI coding to produce AmigaOS 4 software.

Of course no need to use AI, but not using AI to accelerate the grunt work of parsing an open source format seams like a labor of love or a waste of time :)

I checked OS4depot and I'm going to modernize and extend the font datatype. We'll see how it goes.

Cheers,
Bill

@tekmage

Something that may help in this goal!

MCP for AmigaOS4 v1.0

Quote:

@LiveForIt

I have the MD datatype already.. I have to release it..