Adrian Ford on XPS et cetera

I had an interesting discussion earlier this week with Howie Fenton, a writer for GraphicArts online and also a consultant for NAPL . Howie was interested in XPS and the new Print Path but was also concerned about reports of problems when printing to...

A question that crops up fairly frequently on an internal list is the best way to convert docx to xps. Word is obviously a great tool for that (take a look at Document.ExportAsFixedFormat in the Word Object Model Reference), but it's not always suited...

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...

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)...

RTM = Released to Manufacturing Want more details? Follow the link ...

It's drupa time! For those not familiar with the event, it's a rather large trade show for the printing industry that happens once every four years in Germany. One of my favorite drupa highlights is the drupa song (I think some of the team are still recovering...

The code gallery for the XPS APIs in Windows 7 is now live on MSDN . The gallery has three code samples for using the new APIs: Basics of working with XPS Documents: loading, modifying and saving. Rollup: combing content from different documents. Flow...

Printing hasn't always been the easiest thing to configure and manage in Terminal Services. As Greg Shields puts it "printing and printer drivers have long been the bane of Terminal Services administrators. The pain of keeping the right drivers on...

KDE 4.0 (see announcement ) now includes the Okular document viewer which, according to the documentation , has support for XPS. Cool. Looks like I need to make some time to update my Linux box (and just when I was starting to think about switching it...

Yesterday, Autodesk announced the next release of AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, as part of a family of products. Shaan Hurley has called out some of the highlights from AutoCAD 2009 Product Manager Doug Cochran, including support for XPS-based DWFx files and...

In a previous post I wrote about controlling compression for the Microsoft XPS Document Writer. Brian Mosher asked on the MSDN XPS Forum whether it's possible to programmatically control image compression from the context of an XPSDrv-based printer driver...

I’ve been working with XPS for a long time – I started back in 200N (where N is an integer quite a lot less than 5 ;-), way before I came to work for Microsoft – and today (or rather last Thursday) marks a minor milestone in the evolution of the format...

One format or multiple formats? Some would have you believe that one format does everything everyone will ever need. Some feel that, by extension, two similar formats, or two formats that have some degree of overlap, must be 'competitive' (or designed...

While I was away on holiday (vacation), NiXPS posted 9 XPS benefits for your business. Here they are… Benefit #1: XPS is ideal for sharing and publishing Benefit #2: XPS is truly ‘what you see is what you get’ Benefit #3: XPS is a reliable format for...

Okular, the document viewer included in KDE, has reached version 0.7 . I liked this bit from the random ordered list of features and improvements... "XPS backend: various loading and rendering improvements, should be much more usable now"

The XPS Print Path is shipped as part of Windows Vista and later but it’s also available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.  If you’re developing a hardware device driver for the XPS Print Path (an XPSDrv print driver) you’ll probably want to...

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...

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...

In addition to Windows 7 beta , there’s also a beta available for Windows Server 2008 R2. Details on the Windows Server 2008 page .

News from close to home: Konica Minolta UK has announced support for both Vista XPS printing and WSD ( Web Services on Devices ). Nice one!

Time for a post on one of the XPS features in Windows Vista which I use a lot - archiving to XPS rather than printing. There's lots of times where, in the past, I've had to print out stuff because I needed to, not because I wanted to. Common examples...

SANAtech have published details a viewing control that enables XPS viewing capabilities to be embedded into applications, based on the published description, this looks similar to the DocumentViewer control provided in WPF. The details provided by SANAtech...

Back in 2006 I gave a presentation at the PDF-Forum , an event put together by Stephan Jaeggi and run alongside the Xplor Conference, where I spoke about the use of XPS in high-end printing (commercial printing, pre-press and related areas). One of the...

NiXPS is a Belgium-based company "dedicated to developing cross platform applications and technology for the XPS document format". Today they announced the release of NiXPS v1.0 that provides XPS manipulation and inspection for both Mac OS X and Windows...

Windows Server 2008 provides support for XPS viewing, but it's not enabled by default — after all, only the stuff you need for a particular role should be enabled on a server, right?. Here's a step-by-step guide for how to turn on XPS... Step 1...