A demo of Blogging from Word using ICE

For those who have reading the ICE blog you would know about how we got ICE to work as a command line app, or in other words, as a service rather then just an application. I have taken this one step further by creating the binary version of ICE that takes parameters for rendering and publishing. By adding a macro in to my Word (that's Word 2003) I have been able to publish directly from the word processor to Blogger (the same can be done for OOo).

This has not yet been added to the toolbar as it was merely some playing around on my part to work out any issues, but is coming soon.

Here is a recoding of what what the process maybe like.

A demo of list numbering restarting in ICE toolbar

A special thanks to Ian Barnes for his feedback about the ICE toolbar. Since the last announcement in August we have made quite a few minor but tricky updates, and thanks to Samuel Knipe we have implemented some of the changes from the feedback received. The most useful recent fix is the fact that if a new list is created that the numbering is restarted.

As most avid word processor users would know if you use style based lists the numbering will keep continuing unless you manually restart it. In Word this is a particular problem as restart/continuing can also affect other lists, we have fixed this and made it easier to correct numbering when the word processor get it wrong.

Changes/fixes for the ICE toolbar

Both OpenOffice.org and Word toolbars

1. list numbering is restarted if a new list is created (see demo below)

2. Short cut for list to restart/continue numbering (esc + r)

3. paragraph (p) demotes to blockquote (bq1)

4. Fixed numbering not turning off if on lists that are not li1

5. Fixed demote/promote failing on i-code

OpenOffice.org toolbar

1. List styles are created when applied if they don't exist

2. When generated heading sizes are relative to h1

Word toolbar

1. Installs if downloaded as .doc or .dot

2. Installs into users startup directory

Give it a go, you can download the toolbars from the ice site. and as always feedback is much appreciate.

A demo of lists restarting in Word

Here is a demo of the list numbering, a word of warning I am talking but you may need to turn your sound up as the recording volume is a bit low.

A speak peak at the command line version of ICE

Today Ron, Oliver and I (mainly Ron) implemented a command line version of ICE and while we were at it we also added support to use the ATOM Publishing Protocol I demoed the other day.

The first demo is of the the command line ICE renderer that takes an OpenOffice.org or Word document and generates the HTML and PDF. A user wouldn't necessarily run it as a command line but what the demo shows is that you will soon be able to use ICE as a service.

View the command line ICE demo

The second demo is a combination of the command line HTML render with command line ATOM publishing into Blogger. Note Blogger is purely used for a demo, you will be able to publish to any other location provided it supports ATOM publishing.

View the ATOM Publishing demo

The next step is to add an interface to the ICE toolbar so that you can render your Word or OpenOffice.org document into clean XHTML and publish it using ATOM directly to your Blog or institutional repository. This can all be done from the comfort of your word processor.

Publish to Blogger from ICE: A look at how you can publish using the APP from ICE

In a soon to be released update of ICE you will be able to publish using the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) to blogger and other systems that support the APP. I (Daniel) have already been using ICE to publish directly into the developers blog and will be from now on. At the moment it only publishes HTML (no media resources), but you'll find that Blogger and other weblog services are also limited to this, for now at least.

As mentioned in the last cycle notes using the APP opens up huge potential for us to publish to institutional repositories more easily for the ICE-RS project. We have already started working on a command line version of ICE that when plugged into our ICE toolbar means you be able to publish directly from your word processor (Word, OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice) to your blog, or your local repository without all the overheads normally required with ICE. Best of all it will be nice clean and light weight XHTML with bonus PDF.

You can view a demo of how I published the ICE-RS cycle notes here.

If you are interested in finding out more please feel free to contact us

ICE-RS cycle notes for the cycle ending 2007-09-20

• Summary
• Overview of completed tasks
  • Components
• Outstanding tasks
• Overview of new tasks
  • Components
  • About the cycle notes
  • More information

Summary

In the previous cycle we setup a server version of ICE for the RUBRIC Toolkit, this was a rather slow and slightly painful process due to the usual problems faced in a university environment. The server version allows browsing with searching, the next step is to allow for annotations. ATOM publishing Protocol (APP) was also added to ICE (HTML only, images/objects to come), and we can now use it to publish to Blogger, such as for these cycle notes. Once we have full APP implemented we can then start work with using SWORD once it becomes available.

This cycle we will be rolling out a version of ICE with basic implementation of APP, and continue on full implementation including ATOM feeds. We are also going to work on a command line version of ICE so it can act as a service, i.e. a 'light weight' version, initially to create HTML and PDF as well as ATOM publishing. This will be incorporated into our ICE toolbar so that you don't need all the other bells and whistles (Subversion repository etc) to make use of ICE.

Predicted work units: 100

Overview of completed tasks

Components

Administration

• Support and setup of ICE-RS pilots users at Flinders University

Application

• Setup server version for FOSTER toolkit

• Add annotations (first)

• ATOM publishing Protocol (APP)

Templates

• Tweaks and bug fixes

• User testing

Outstanding tasks

• IDEA 2007 conference preparation

• ATOM feeds for ICE

• Add tagging functionality -

• standalone 'Save as HTML' using ICE code in OOo

Overview of new tasks

Components

Administration

• IDEA 2007 conference preparation

• Dissemination (demos)

  • ATOM publishing

  • ICE template updates

  • Another look at Zotero

• ICE 1.2.4 release with ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP)

Application

• Endnote render option in the ICE file manager

• ICE as an executable with parameters

• Image/object support for APP from ICE

• ATOM feeds for ICE

• ICE 1.3 release

  • Annotations interface updates

  • Search interface updates

Bugs

• Book rendering performance bottle neck

• Investigate OOo bug with MathType using OOo 2.3

Templates

• Tweaks and bug fixes

• User testing

• standalone 'Save as HTML' using the ICE exe from OOo

• Add APP to OOo extension using the ICE exe

About the cycle notes

The cycle notes are used to summarize the outcomes of the completed cycle and provide stake-holders with an overview of the tasks for the next cycle. They are also used to raise any issues for discussion and provide other information for those who are unable to attend the meetings. Specific information on tasks to be completed are available in the ticketing system, see below.

More information

http://ice.usq.edu.au/trac/roadmap

View archived cycle notes

Modified: Sep 6, 2007

ICE Discussion forum available

The has been a steady increase in discussions and interest on and off the mailing lists of late and the ICE application is also becoming more service orientated. To help assist with communications about these new areas and now that our version of Trac has been updated discussion forums have been setup, and include:

ICE Application

Discussions about the ICE application

ICE Server

Discussion about the ICE server side version

ICE Toolbar

Discussions about the ICE toolbar

Bugs

Reporting and discussions of bugs

There are no topics as yet so please feel free to start adding some. To use the discussion forum you'll first need to be a registered user.

If you have any problems please use the form on the contact us page.

ICE 1.2.3 has been released

The next version of ICE has been made available with the following fixes and improvements. As this is a minor release changes include mostly bug fixes. You can download the latest version via the ICE website from http://ice.usq.edu.au/instructions/downloads.htm.

Bugs fixes include:

• Check links reporting email address as invalid

• Links on images that are anchored as characters don't work

• Footnotes and endnotes are displayed in the referring paragraph instead of at the end of the page/document

• Hidden items in packages appearing when loaded using the IMS manifest, such as when uploaded into Moodle.

Changes/features include:

• The bold and italics character formatting is rendered using the corresponding HTML elements 'b' and 'i'.

• A message is displayed when a book file is locked while trying to re-build

• A new feature to add links in a document as endnotes. This is only in alpha stage, improvements to be made in future releases, to see how this works see the demo.

For more information see the full release notes at http://ice.usq.edu.au/releases/latest.htm