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XPS - XML Paper Specification

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Undocumented Printing.

The XML Paper Specification (XPS), formerly codenamed “Metro”, is a document storage and viewing specification developed by Microsoft. The specification itself describes the formats and rules for distributing, archiving, rendering, and processing XPS documents. Most notably, the markup language for XPS is a subset of XAML for Windows Presentation Foundation, so that the methods used for rendering Windows applications can be used for documents.

XPS is viewed as a potential competitor to Adobe’s portable document format (PDF). XPS, however, is a static document format that does not include dynamic capabilities similar to those of PDF.

Technology

An XPS file is in fact a ZIP archive, which contains the files which make up the document. These include an XML markup file for each page, the embedded images and fonts, as well as the digital rights management information. The contents of the XPS file can be examined simply by opening the file as a ZIP file. In Windows this can be accomplished by simply replacing the .xps file extension with .zip, and then opening it with any ZIP file viewer, including the one built into the operating system.

Licensing

In order to encourage wide use of the format, Microsoft has released XPS under a royalty-free patent license, allowing users to create implementations of the specification that read, write and render XPS files under certain conditions. The specification itself is released under a royalty-free copyright license.
XML Paper Specification Licensing