XML Paper Specification (XPS)

Most people find it convenient and straightforward to exchange documents in electronic ways. This has certainly made our life a lot easier, but we have also learned to give up a few things we took for granted with paper.

Formatting is such a thing. Even if we use the same application to create and view a document, it may not be displayed in the same way across the machines we are using. Even worse, subtle differences may cause the document to look different on different output devices such as printers. Add to the mix a global environment with different paper formats and your documents may be displayed or printed in a number of interesting, but unintended ways.

The widespread use of colour output devices has added yet another level of complexity, and the intricacies of electronic typography. And think about it – once we solve this problem, we achieve parity with paper documents. In order to fully exploit the power of all the applications involved, we want to exchange embedded data (or Metadata) inside those documents along the way.

It should be no surprise that XPS, an attempt to achieve all these tasks at the Windows platform level, is an XML based mechanism. Microsoft has developed such a mechanism with the specification and implementation of XPS. XPS is a cross-platform document format that allows customers to effortlessly create, share, print, and archive paginated documents. You can download the specification and license here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/downloads.mspx. The XPS Specification describes the format in an open and published specification. It is provided to developers and users under a royalty-free license. The stated goal is to provide an open mechanism for cross-application and cross-platform document exchange.

You should not be worried by the fact XPS is XML based. While XML makes data accessible and interchangeable, XML documents are often larger than proprietary binary formats. To offset this effect, XPS makes use the Open Packaging Conventions as described in the XPS specification. Basically, the XML files are stored in a ZIP archive in a well defined manner. This is the very same mechanism used by Office 2007 for the new XML based Office file formats. The resulting files are actually noticeably smaller compared to the previous binary formats. The Open Packaging Conventions also add other important functionality, such as a way to digitally sign documents.

While it is great to have an open, Royalty-free specification, developers on Windows most likely will not want to create XPS documents on their own.

Windows Vista introduces several new options to create XPS documents: One of them is a print driver, enabling the creation of XPS documents from any application.

Windows Vista also introduces APIs to create XPS documents. All of these APIs are part of WinFX, and all are part of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

Windows Vista also introduces a new print pipeline with an integrated spool format, a new print driver model and a printer page description language based on XPS Document format. In order to view documents on-screen, an XPS viewer is shipped to view, manage, and print files that conform to the XML Paper Specification.

While all of these features will be introduced along with Windows Vista, there will be support for prior operating systems. By installing the WinFX runtime on Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP1 you will be able to create or view XPS on these platforms as well.