Adrian Ford on XPS et cetera

MadCap announced today that the latest version of Capture includes XPS support: “Capture 3.0 provides the ability to save and load images in Microsoft XPS, providing a much crisper image that does not become pixilated when someone zooms in. The new functionality in Capture complements support for the XPS standard available with other MadCap solutions, including Flare, Blaze and X-Edit.”

More in the press release.

Zoran has announced version 8.1 of the IPS interpreter which “…fully supports Microsoft’s XPSDrv print path”.

“As a technology supplier that has earned Microsoft’s Driver Test Manager certifications, Zoran continues to demonstrate its full commitment to software compatibility,” said Jack Mayo, Group Program Manager for Windows Documents & Printing, Microsoft Corporation. “Certification from Microsoft helps ensure seamless product compatibility between software developed using Zoran’s IPS™ Interpreter for XPS and the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.”

More information in the press release.

Today Toshiba announced the immediate availability of the Toshiba e-STUDIO(TM)5520c/5520CT/6520c/6520CT/6530c/6530CT series of MFPs with XPS support.

“Building on its long-standing relationship with Microsoft, the e-STUDIO5520c/6520c/6530c MFP series provides Windows Vista-specific printing enhancements in the form of XPS Print Path drivers, Windows Color System support and Windows Vista WS print and scan support”

“The entire color line also allows users to scan directly to, or print directly from a USB flash storage drive in popular office file formats, including PDF, JPEG and Windows Vista XPS”

Details in the press release.

XPS Associates have released two testing products for XPS:

• C-XPS Render is designed to test accurate rendering by providing test content and expected results
• C-XPS Speed Suite is designed to test rendering performance by providing test content

More information on the test suites from XPS Associates on XPS Review and c-xps.

In a related post [1] John Ingram has reviewed the Software Imaging XPS viewer and provided comparison rendering and performance details with the IE-host viewer in .Net and the Brava! viewer from informative graphics. I’d be interested to see how other implementations compare…

Footnote:

[1] you need to read the full post on the main XPS review page since the direct link has a truncated version (or at least when using IE8b2)

Not content with the multiple XPS viewers for Windows, Mac & Linux? Software Imaging have introduced their own XPS viewer that uses their PrintMagicXPS rendering engine (i.e. it doesn’t rely on the rendering engine in WPF).

More details from Software Imaging

Konica Minolta continue to release products with support for XPS, the latest is the Magicolor 5600 Series. Additional details of Konica Minolta and Windows Vista at http://www.biz.konicaminolta.com/technologies/vista_compatibility/.

PDC

Tim has a nice post outlining some of what you might hear about if you’re going to PDC this year. Already there’s a load of interesting session abstracts on the PDC2008 site and it’s also been announced that “keynote attendees will be among the first to receive the pre-beta build of Windows 7”.

Did I just use the ‘Windows 7’ word?

WinHEC

Complementing the software angle of PDC is the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference which is “focused on designing PCs, servers, and devices that run and interface with Windows”. There’s already session preview and keynote information available with a range of stuff on Windows 7.

There, I just did it again :-)

Nuance has announced OmniPage Capture SDK 16 — "Nuance has also added robust support for the XML Paper Specification, XPS, which enables document sharing and archiving with Windows Vista."

More details in the press release.

IRISPdf has been updated to version 7.2. XPS is included in the list of enhancements:

“An important new output format is the XML Paper Specification (XPS). Like Adobe's PDF format, XPS is a fixed-layout document format designed to preserve document fidelity, so that documents look the same and as they are intended on any device. Various XPS file types can be generated with IRISPdf(TM) 7.2 Server: image-text, text, and text-image. Options include the creation of bookmarks, inclusion of graphics, and retention of color of text. XPS-iHQC(TM) is I.R.I.S.' hyper-compression proprietary technology, with the most impressive color compression applied to the XPS format.”

More in the I.R.I.S press release.

MadCap Software has announced MadCap Blaze, a new tool long document authoring, with support for XPS:

“Microsoft is thrilled by the launch of MadCap Blaze, which extends the power of XPS into the world of long document print publishing,” said Jack Mayo, group program manager for Windows Documents & Printing. “With the addition of Blaze to the already well-established content authoring product Flare, MadCap Software demonstrates once again the innovation in content delivery that is enabled by the latest technology offered through Microsoft XPS, Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5”

More in the MadCap press release.

There’s an update on the activities to standardize XPS on the Ecma TC46 page. Enjoy.

“…the e-STUDIO2330c provides Windows Vista-specific printing enhancements in the form of XPS Print Path drivers, Windows Color System support and Windows Vista WS print and scan support, while remaining 100 percent backwards-compatible with existing deployments.”

More in the Toshiba press release

MXDW – the Microsoft XPS Document Writer – includes the ability to open XPS files that are created. To enable this, you’ll need to dig into the preferences dialog where you’ll find the following on the XPS Documents tab:

The ‘Automatically open XPS documents using the XPS viewer’ option enables just that.

Did you know that Windows Vista includes a system-supplied property handler for XPS? Details of how to use the XPS handler, and on how to write your own handler, are available on MSDN.