Adrian Ford on XPS et cetera : XPS

Publisher 2010 TR and Printing to XPS

adrian ford — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:15:14 GMT

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-388 PR

adrian ford — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:54:58 GMT

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.

GreenPrint v2 with XPS

adrian ford — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:32:48 GMT

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.

kReader PC

adrian ford — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:34:23 GMT

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.

Zoran Enhances XPS Print Path Support

adrian ford — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:10:17 GMT

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.

Active XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:29:06 GMT

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

Document Toolkit v1 available

adrian ford — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:12:05 GMT

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.

Windows HD Imaging AQ

adrian ford — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:24:03 GMT

Dan just posted details of the Windows HD Imaging Additional Qualifier (AQ) for the Windows 7 logo program. Details and links are on the XPS team blog.

Office Service Pack 2 with XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:37:04 GMT

Office service pack 2 is now available – you can read the details pretty much anywhere but a good place to start is the Inside Office blog which has links to the official announcement, blog articles, technical and support information and, yes, the download link.

From the document perspective the big news in SP2 is the inclusion of support for ODF, PDF and XPS (plus the file format convertor API). Tom Robertson provides details on how this fits with our commitment to interoperability in this post while Gray Knowlton digs into the details here and provides a Q&A here.

Enjoy.

SimonSays How to Display XPS in Silverlight

adrian ford — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:57:02 GMT

Another XPS in Silverlight link. This one is from Simon Guest with details on how he updated David Anson’s sample to work around changes in Silverlight 2. Source code available.

XPS to OneNote

adrian ford — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:46:31 GMT

David Rasmussen on using XPS to print to OneNote. There’s also a codeplex project.

Final Draft of OpenXPS

adrian ford — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:35:29 GMT

After 20 months of hard work, 8 face-to-face meetings (in Japan, Europe and the USA), numerous conference calls and a load of email, TC46, the technical committee working on the standardization of XPS, has published the final draft of the OpenXPS specification – denoted as version 1.6.

As Ecma notes in this post, this draft marks a major milestone for the XPS format, the next step is the decision of the Ecma General Assembly on whether OpenXPS will become an Ecma Standard.

Alongside the final draft, TC46 has published a white paper that provides an overview of the Ecma OpenXPS format. The white paper includes the rationale for OpenXPS, how the format is different from other document formats, details on the features and their benefits provided by the format, and an overview of technical details.

The draft of OpenXPS and the white paper can both be downloaded from the TC46 activities page.

Micropress joins Fiery

adrian ford — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:20:12 GMT

EFI announced a “significantly enhanced” MicroPress with many new features including XPS support. MicroPress joins the Fiery, which also has support for XPS as announced back at drupa 2008.

4 x PDF on XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:32:23 GMT

"Standards need to be open, otherwise they won’t be accepted anymore. Interoperability is important, as people do not want to get locked-in anymore. But everybody should still welcome a good, sound technology that aims to bring electronic document nirvana closer."

That quote is from an interesting article by Nick De Roeck of NiXPS published by 4 x PDF. Enjoy the read.

NiXPS: now with PDF and SVG

adrian ford — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:45:07 GMT

From NiXPS:

NiXPS View v2.6.1 now features PDF export. NiXPS Edit can now export XPS pages to SVG, and has a new interactive text editing tool which greatly facilitates text corrections.