General Questions

What does ICE stand for?

Chris Meyers, ex of USQ suggested then name, The Integrated Courseware Environment. This was soon changed to The Integrated Content Environment, mainly to support the bid for funding that USQ put to the Australian Government which resulted in the RUBRIC project.

What does ICE do?

ICE is a content management system, but it's safe to say that it's like no other content management system. While there is an 'ICE' application, it's really a collection of different parts most of which can be used on their own, or together with the other parts.

For courseware

ICE lets you build book length courses for deliver online (via the IMS packaging standard) and in print, via PDF books. You work on a single source for your materials in a word processor such as Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice.org Writer.

For general intranet use in small teams

ICE can be used to manage documents for a small team or website (like this one). We have found it useful for compiling agendas, minutes and reports into books for formal meetings; and for content like the RUBRIC toolkit for repository managers.

For researchers & students

We are testing ICE for writing papers and conference presentations, building on work we started under the ICE for Research and Scholarship project. We think ICE would be ideal for writing your thesis, and sharing it with your supervisor.

But what does it do?

ICE does this:

1. It takes word processing documents and turns them into HTML and PDF automatically, every time you change a document you can see the changes immediately through your web browser.

2. It can run on a server (coming in version 2) or on your Mac, Linux or Windows PC.

3. It talks to a content repository run by a version control system called Subversion that a system administrator sets up for a team. Subversion is a bit technical to use but ICE aims to make it easy to synchronise content.

4. It can manage distributed content when people are both offline and online.

5. It lets people comment on works in progress in the web browser, this is ideal for reviewers and thesis supervisors and so on.

Here's a list of the things in the ICE project from a technical point of view.

1. A standard set of names for word processing styles.

2. A replacement for the word processor toolbar that uses styles instead of direct formatting. See this demo.

3. Toolkit for building cross-platform word processing templates for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org based on the above for discipline specific use. For example we have an APA template for people who want to write APA documents, with more being developed all the time.

4. Conversion services to turn word processing documents that use the above styles into XHTML (and beyond, to things like presentations via the magic of microformats) - there are now a variety of interfaces to this: Python libraries, commandline, a web API, and integrated into the word processor.

5. An IMS packaging application to link multiple documents into a coherent mini web site.

6. For blogging from your word processor, an Atom Publishing Protocol client implementation.

7. A tool to collate word processing documents into books and take care of cross referencing.

8. Some miscellaneous tools to help the scholar, such as the ability to turn links into footnotes for the PDF version of a document and strip-out links to the filesystem.

9. A web interface to Subversion to make it easy for ordinary users to collaborate with version control.

10. An annotation system to allow comments on documents, including inline comments.

Which word processor can I use?

To perform its magic ICE uses the Open Document Format, which is an OASIS standard.

The best support for ODF is in the OpenOffice.org family of word processors, but you can use Microsoft Word on Windows or Mac OS X. See our ODF Support page (TODO) for more information.

Highly Recommended

The following will give you the best possible results editing documents for use with ICE.

Recommended

Not recommended

The following are not (yet) supported. If an application is not on the list here then we have not tested it well enough to make a judgement.

Questions about styles and templates

What makes you think authors will use your styles?

See Why ICE works, by Peter Sefton.

Why are the style names short and obscure?

After much deliberation we decided to use short style names like 'h1' for a top-level heading, and li2b for a second level bulleted list item.

The set of style names is designed to be different to those that ship by default with major word processors in order to emphasize that this is a self-contained system. For example, a first level heading is called h1, rather than Heading 1 in Word or OpenOffice.org while a first level bulleted list item would be li1b for “list item, level 1, bullet”.

In the default style-sets that come with other word processors this kind of list item might be “List 1” in OpenOffice.org, or “List Bullet 1” in Word. The Word style name is more readable than the ICE style, but at the cost of being so long that it can be difficult to work with in Word itself, when trying to view style names in the left margin (a feature denied to users of OpenOffice.org).

ICE styles may be applied with a hierarchical menu that sorts styles by function and is navigable using keyboard shortcuts in a predictable way.

(Sefton 2006)

Why don't you use the standard style names that come with the word processor?

There is no useful set of standard styles that ships with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org, apart from the minimal set of “Heading 1 ... n”. See these posts from Peter Sefton, looking at how you might fare trying to use Word, OpenOffice.org Writer and Google Docs out of the box to produce an HTML-formatted paper.

Questions about installing ICE

What platforms does it run on?

• Windows (XP and Vista at least)

• Mac OSX 10.4 plus (not OS X 10.5 on the PPC platform)

• Linux – we can help you with Ubuntu, otherwise you're on your own.

Where can I download it?

The ICE application itself

Get ready-to go binaries of the latest stable version.

Get the source.

Is there a server version?

ICE 2 which is currently in beta testing can run as a server, meaning users don't need to install so much stuff on their computer. We will update this FAQ with some advice about which version of ICE you should install when version 2 is released.

Why is it so complicated to install? And what are you doing about?

ICE uses the OpenOffice.org to do document conversions, which means you have to install it and configure it to listen for formatting requests from ICE and also requires the use of a Subversion repository.

We're working on this on multiple fronts:

1. We will improve the installer whenever we can.

2. We're working on letting the ICE application on your computer use conversion services on another computer (so OpenOffice.org doesn't need to be installed or running on your computer). This also means you don't need a Subversion repository.

3. The server version of ICE is in beta. Once it is released users will only need a simple plugin for their word processor in the form of a template in Word or an OpenOffice.org extension for Writer.