There’s a new blog in town – the print team blog on TechNet – which joins the XPS team and Packaging team as a place for information on XPS, documents and printing in and around the Windows platform.

Recommended.

Justin just posted on the XPS team blog news of Publisher 2010 support for printing via the XPS Print Path. When used with a device that supports XPS, Publisher generates XPS print content and submits that directly to the XPS Print Path. The technical preview for Office 2010 is available, although it looks like there’s a waitlist registration process to go through if you’re not already on the program.

Ecma has published a press release on the approval of OpenXPS which includes quotes from many of the companies involved in the standard. Related, Dan has published some background details on the XPS Team Blog.

Title says it all. See the link for details.

Some OpenXPS links…

• Ecma announcement: ECMA-388 approved
• Stephen McGibbon, European Regional Technology Officer, on Ecma OpenXPS
• Martin Bailey, former TC46 chair and CTO of Global Graphics
• OpenXPS White Paper
• Download the standard (specification and schemas)
• ICC details on profile embedding (currently points to the TC46 page)
• Wikipedia – looks like the XPS page has been (confusingly!) updated to OpenXPS and (even more confusingly) mixes up the format with implementations of the format. Oh dear.

That Long, Long Road from Idea to Success (with a minor mention of XPS).

GreenPrint Software have released version 2 of GreenPrint, their tool to help reduce unnecessary printing.

The Press Release includes the following:

The paper-saving software, which eliminates unwanted pages and reduces printing by 17% or more, has been redesigned from the ground up around Microsoft’s new XPS print path. In addition to improved speed, the new architecture also provides greater waste detection functionality and better output performance.

“We realized pretty quickly after launching Version 1 that in order to get the consistent use necessary to save the average user $100 per year in printing costs, we needed to make GreenPrint much, much faster,” said GreenPrint CTO James Kellerman

More details on www.printgreener.com and a white paper on the GreenPrint blog.

The team at knfbReading Technology have built a book reader targeting assisted reading and study skills for students and based on the XPS format.

Here’s a glimpse:

More details on kReader PC on the knfbReader site.

Global Graphics have released gDoc Fusion and gDoc Creator that provide conversion and editing functionality for working with various file formats, including PDF, XPS and Word OOXML. Details on their site.

NiXPS on OpenXPS, Office 2007 SP2 and Windows 7 XPS Viewer.

Global Graphics now blogging on XPS, PDF and related stuff.

java-axp: 100% Java XPS file reader (old, but had dropped off my radar).

Make sure you UpdateLayout() when using XPS in WPF.

Markware blogging on preflight and data conversion

Nuance OmniPage 17 to ‘Unlock the Green Office’.

The foundation for XPS (OpenXPS), OOXML and a number of other formats is a common ZIP-based container. This container is defined by the Open Packaging Conventions and is standardized in ISO/IEC 29500-2 and ECMA 376-2. (We often refer to Open Packaging Conventions as OPC, or just ‘packaging’.)

Want to learn more? The packaging team are now blogging: you’ll find them at http://blogs.msdn.com/opc/

Zoran has announced enhancements to their IPS DDK 3.0 driver development kit with XPS Print Path support, including support for Windows 7. Details in the press release.

ActivePDF adds support for XPS in activePDF Server 2009. Details in the press release.

In case you’re reading this haven’t already got the Windows 7 RC via MSDN or TechNet, you can now download via the Windows 7 page on microsoft.com.

Enjoy.

First Floor have released version 1.0 of their document toolkit for client-side display of XPS using Silverlight. Details in this blog post.

The documentation is also available online, including details of conformance with the spec, note that TIFF and HD Photo images and ICC color profiles are currently not supported.