What is XPS?
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2005 in April 2005, Microsoft announced that it would include a new document format and printing architecture called XML Paper Specification (XPS, codenamed “Metro”) in Windows Vista. Based on XML, XPS is to Windows Vista as Adobe PDF is to Mac OS X: It’s a device- and application-independent printing architecture that allows documents to retain their exact formatting in any application, and when printed. Unlike PDF, however, XPS is based on XML and will be released as an open standard. XPS also incorporates ZIP technology–similar to that used by the next major version of Microsoft Office–to compress and decompress files on the fly. From a technology standpoint, XPS includes an XML-based electronic paper format, a document viewer for viewing, managing, and printing XPS files, the ability to digitally sign XPS documents, APIs that allow programmers to integrate their applications and services with XPS, a print pipeline, and a new
