ICE: Frequently Asked Questions
What does ICE stand for?
Chris Meyers, ex of USQ suggested the 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 is ICE ?
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 CD and online delivery (via the IMS packaging standard) and in print, via PDF books. A word processor such as Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice.org Writer is used to create course content.
- For general intranet use in small teams
- ICE can be used to manage documents for a small team or website (like this one). It can be 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 using ICE for writing papers and conference presentations, building on work we started under the ICE for Research and Scholarship project. ICE would be ideal for writing your thesis, sharing it with your supervisor and publishing to a repository. ICE can export to ePrints or Fedora based repositories for research work.
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.
Highly Recommended
The following will give you the best possible results editing documents for use with ICE.
Application | Platform | Why? |
OpenOffice.org 3.0 | Windows, Linux, OSX | This allows ICE to render your documents into PDF using the same application as you use for editing, so you get the best possible output. |
Recommended
Application | Platform | Caveats | ||||
| Using Word you do not get full What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) support. Lists may not number correctly if you interchange documents with OpenOffice.org writer users. | |||||
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.
Application | Platform | Why not? | Required work |
AbiWord | any | Does not support styles, particularly list styles in the same way as OpenOffice.org Writer. | Would need to write a file normalizer that could adapt AbiWord files to the OOo way of doing things and vice versa. |
KWord | any | Same as AbiWord. | Same as AbiWord. |
TextEdit | OS X | It's not a word processor it's a text editor. | Not possible to support it. |
Word 2008 on OS X |
| Does not have the VisualBasic for Applications (VBA) macro language. You can use it, but there is no toolbar. | Wait for the next version of Word on OS X where Microsoft are promising to put VBA support back in. |
Google Documents | web | Does not support styles, will break ICE documents | Write an adaptor – this is under consideration because Google Docs has great collaboration features |
OpenOffice.org 2.4 | Any | Does not support automation. | Wait for a fix from the OOo team, we reported the bug. |
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 can run as a server, meaning users don't need to install ICE on their computer.
Is it complicated to install?
ICE uses the OpenOffice.org to convert documents, which means you have to install and configure it to listen for formatting requests from ICE. ICE also requires the use of a Subversion repository, this can be set-up locally for a single user, or on a server for use across a group.