Adrian Ford on XPS et cetera : print

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.

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.

Kyocera Mita does XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:27:47 GMT

Kyocera Mita has announced the TASKalfa 500ci series of Color Multifunctional Products with support for XPS. For more information see http://usa.kyoceramita.com/americas/jsp/Kyocera/news_presscenter_details.jsp?msid=19538

XPS at WinHEC

adrian ford — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:41:24 GMT

There’s loads of great stuff on the agenda for WinHEC (how I wish I was going back down to LA…) but two things I wanted to highlight:

XPS Rasterization and XPSDrv Performance in Windows 7 - CON-C650

This chalk-talk begins with a brief architectural overview of XPSDrv, XPS rasterization service and dependencies, and XPSDrv component performance improvements in Windows 7. It will end with a question-and-answer session.

Presenter(s):
Daniel Emerson
Daniel is a Lead Program Manager working on the core infrastructure and rendering services for Print, Scan and Fax in Windows. He joined the Windows Experience team at Microsoft six years ago and has contributed to the development of the Windows client/server printing infrastructure, print drivers and XPS printing.
Felix Maxa
Felix Maxa is the development lead for the team that owns core service components for printing, imaging and fax. Felix has worked at MS on printing since 1998.
Georgi Chalakov
Georgi Chalakov is a Senior Developer on the Windows Experience, Documents and Printing team, where he is responsible for the XPS Rasterization Service and other XPS features for Windows 7. Previously, he was a developer working on XPS Viewer in XPS Essentials Pack and Microsoft XPS Document Converter. Georgi graduated from Sofia University with a degree in Computer Science, and currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his family.
Ashwin Needamangala
As a Senior Test Lead in Microsoft's Windows Experience (WEX) - Documents & Printing group, Ashwin Needamangala is responsible for testing the rendering components that are part of the printing subsystem in Windows. His team also owns the development of the Windows Logo Kit (WLK) for printing. Ashwin has been working with the Documents & Printing group for over eight years. During that time his team has produced key tools such as PTConform, LooksGood as well as numerous tests that ship as part of the WLK. He is also the co-architect for PrintVerifier.

Level: 300
Session Time:

Friday, November 07, 2008 11:00 AM

XPS Printer Driver Development in Windows 7 - CON-T572

The XPSDrv printer driver model is the future of Windows printing. This session details the new features and improvements for XPSDrv printer drivers in Windows 7, including the XPS Rasterization Service, the XPS Object Model API and the filter pipeline, and discussion of filter pipeline enhancements.

Presenter(s):
Georgi Chalakov
Georgi Chalakov is a Senior Developer on the Windows Experience, Documents and Printing team, where he is responsible for the XPS Rasterization Service and other XPS features for Windows 7. Previously, he was a developer working on XPS Viewer in XPS Essentials Pack and Microsoft XPS Document Converter. Georgi graduated from Sofia University with a degree in Computer Science, and currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his family.
Felix Maxa
Felix Maxa is the development lead for the team that owns core service components for printing, imaging and FAX. Felix has worked at MS on printing since 1998.

Level: 200
Session Time:

Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:15 PM

In addition to these two, there’s content covering the wider print and document peripheral space that’s likely to be relevant to anyone reading this far…

Enjoy.

New XPS Features in Windows 7

adrian ford — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:29:12 GMT

We’ve been busy.

Last week at PDC we unveiled Windows 7 and provided developers with a first look at the bits. This week at WinHEC we’re providing further details about Windows 7 for the hardware community. The big Windows 7 news for XPS is that we’ve extended the developer surface to include applications built on Win32. With Windows Vista (and back to XP) we have a great developer story for managed code development with XPS support in .Net 3.0 (and later). With Windows 7 we now have great support for developers working with Win32 (aka native) code.

New Win32 APIs in Windows 7 that we covered at PDC last week:

XPS API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for XPS documents and print streams
OPC API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for Open Packaging Conventions-based file formats, including XPS, OOXML and an increasing number of industrial strength third party file formats
XPS Print API provides a new entry point for applications to benefit from the enhanced XPS Print Path, irrespective of whether the final output device supports XPS

There’s also enhancements to the user experience and components for driver developers. More details on all of this in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, you can catch up on the content presented at PDC on Channel9.

New Toshiba e-Studio

adrian ford — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:17:05 GMT

“…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.”

Océ announce XPS Device Support

adrian ford — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:34:16 GMT

Océ has announced two new color MFPs with XPS support, the cm2522 and cm3522:

Users will have the capability to move information more rapidly throughout the entire organization by seamlessly integrating with existing network infrastructure. The Océ cm2522 and Océ cm3522 come standard with a 1GHz MHz print/scan controller, 60GB HDD and 1 GB RAM. Integrated and easy-to-use software utilities allow both users and administrators access to powerful tools for document, device and network management. Complete with Windows Vista® support, standard PCL®6, PostScript 3® emulations, XPS and IPv6 protocol support, the Océ cm2522 and Océ cm3522 are ready for the next generation network environment.

Timing is everything (or Actino Software XPS Toolkit)

adrian ford — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:34:27 GMT

LOL. When I wrote this post about EskoArtwork & Enfocus yesterday I wasn't expecting to see an announcement today that Enfocus is introducing XPS support at drupa. According to the press release, Enfocus Switch will support XPS conversion using the XPS Toolkit from Actino Software. Michael Karbe, president and CEO of Actino is quoted as saying:

"All prepress and print companies have a PDF based production system and we give them the simple opportunity to receive XPS. XPS creation is free and the properties are given, so you cannot forget to embed fonts, for example. Very good reasons for printers or digital print shops to ask their customer for XPS."

I'll try to keep more on the ball in future ;-)

Printing Green with XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:51:00 GMT

My email signature varies, but typically it looks something like this:

Don't need to print this? If you need simple, secure, electronic paper then try XPS.

It's my take on the more common urge to 'please consider the environment before printing this email'.

Recently there's been a bit of a trend in covering ways of reducing the environmental impact of printing. Examples: PCmag.com on three steps to the paperless office, Vince Ferraro on HPs Strategy and Portfolio of Environmental Solutions, and Jim Lyons on advising on the current and future role of paper. There's a range of solutions, from straightforward print preview to utilities like GreenPrint (with the wonderful tagline — millions of trees can't be wrong).

So how does all this relate to XPS? Well, since XPS is an electronic paper format you probably won't be surprised that it's a good alternative to physical paper for many situations. For me, there's three ways I use XPS to help manage what and how I print:

Archiving to electronic paper, not physical paper
Print previewing
Deferred printing

Archiving to electronic paper

I've written about this previously, so here I'll just repeat that "Computers replace filing cabinets, not paper", Windows has excellent instant search with metadata support and mention The Social Life of Paper just for good measure.

Print Previewing

Many applications provide a rich print preview capability, for example Excel allows you to see how a spreadsheet fits (or doesn't!) onto a page while Internet Explorer lets you scale content to make best use of the paper. Another option is provided by the many printer drivers that also offer print preview capabilities. But what can you do if the application or driver you're using doesn't support preview? With XPS you have the option of printing from the application to XPS (via the Microsoft XPS Document Writer), checking the content in the XPS viewer before reprinting to a physical printer. This technique also lets you get explicit about the pages you want to print when it might not be clear from the application exactly what content will end up on which page.

Deferred Printing

"Deferred" printing is for all the times when you *might* need to print so you print just in case. For example that order confirmation that urges you to "print a copy for your records" or the web page that you need a copy of for possible future reference. Instead of printing you can make an XPS file just like with print previewing, but then store it on the hard drive so it's there if you need to really print it at some future point. What's better is that with the support for metadata and indexing you can file away your deferred print jobs while still making it easy to retrieve them if you need to, and you can even print a physical copy directly from the Windows Explorer.

So, if you don't need to print this, try XPS

EFI add XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:47:13 GMT

EFI announced yesterday that they will be showcasing the Fiery open platform at drupa 2008 with support for XPS. The press release highlights that EFI developed the XPS technology in-house and that it ensures Fiery users can benefit from improved transparency and color rendering, as well as smaller file sizes for faster network performance, when printing Office documents.

Konica Minolta

adrian ford — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:42:00 GMT

Konica Minolta continues to roll out devices with in-built support for XPS, the latest is the bizhub 40P/40PX monchrome desktop printer.

More in the press release and Konica Minolta web site.

Software Imaging Boosts XPS Performance

adrian ford — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:20:01 GMT

Software Imaging has updated PrintMagicXPS to take advantage of hyper-threading and multi-core architectures.

Generating XPS Automagically

adrian ford — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:16:31 GMT

I got a mail overnight asking about ways to automatically generate XPS from applications, specifically asking for a way to enable existing applications that don't have knowledge of XPS to generate XPS content. The Microsoft XPS Document Writer (MXDW) allows you to do this, irrespective of whether you're using the .Net or Win32 platforms. There's two ways that applications can invoke MXDW. The first is via the normal action of a user printing, where MXDW is explicitly selected as the target printer. When using this route MXDW displays a 'Save As' dialog so the user can set the target XPS filename. The second route is where the application programmatically selects MXDW as the printer, in this case it can automatically set the output filename by setting lpszOutput in DOCINFO [1] [2]. Typically this route would be invoked by an user selecting 'Save As XPS' in the interface, with the application taking advantage of the print subsystem to do most of the work.

If you don't want users to select the filename (perhaps you want the file saved to some magic folder for further processing), and you're not in a position to modify the application to support setting the destination with DOCINFO, then there is another option [3]. Microsoft makes available the core components of MXDW as part of the Windows Driver Kit (available on Microsoft Connect and MSDN Subscriber Downloads). Using the WDK it is possible to build a custom XPS print driver (XPSDrv) that automates the output process, including doing much more than just setting a destination filename automatically. The WDK even includes samples that illustrate modifying the XPS content using the Filter Pipeline Interfaces within XPSDrv. Using this approach a third party could, relatively easily, provide a 'Print to Custom Workflow' print driver which generates XPS. A second advantage of this approach is that the custom driver can also specify configuration options that are aligned with the requirements of the downstream workflow, rather than relying on the generic settings exposed by the standard MXDW printer.

An obvious question is "Why doesn't MXDW provide a way to set a destination automatically without requiring code in the application?" Technically, this would be rather straightforward (or at least, as straightforward as anything is when you have as many customers and partners as Windows), but the bigger problem is the consistency of user experience. For the larger scenario — enabling XPS to be submitted to some downstream workflow — you really want the destination to be explicit, for example by providing the ability to print to a destination that identifies the workflow. Here's what I mean:

Implementing by building a custom driver on the XPSDrv foundation is a nice clean way of enabling this scenario.

Footnote:

[1] The app can also do this when a user has explicitly selected MXDW as the printer, although this isn't recommended since the user experience might not be quite what the user expected.

[2] Feng has the details.

[3] Actually, there's more than one other option, for example see this post from Feng, although note the limitations!

Configuring Compression in XPS Drivers

adrian ford — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 08:36:21 GMT

This is an update on controlling compression options in a driver.

In Windows Vista SP1 we've added the capability for drivers to control image compression. For drivers based in PScript5UI.dll or UnidrvUI.dll see the documentation on the IPrintOEMUIMXDC interface. For monolithic drivers see MXDCGetPDEVAdjustment.

OneVision Brings Interactive Editing to XPS

adrian ford — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:13:36 GMT

Adoption continues as OneVision announces the launch of new versions of Solvero and Asura with, as you may have guessed, support for XPS amongst the "80 new options and improvements" in version 9.0. If you're not familiar with OneVision solutions, it's highly likely that they formed part of the production workflow for the last newspaper or magazine that you read.

Solvero provides client-based interactive editing of a number of formats, including PostScript, PDF and now XPS, and is primarily targeted at pre-press and publishing solutions. Solvero is available on Mac OS X and Windows systems.

Asura provides automated correction and modification, again including PostScript, PDF and XPS, and is widely used in pre-press and newspaper workflows.

More details in the press release.