Microsoft XML Paper Specification

XPS is the new Microsoft format that competes PDF, I am sure you've heard about it before, however XPS is the Microsoft standard for electronic documents, if you install Office 2007 you can save any office application document as XPS ( you need to install one Office 2007 Add-in to get this option, you can get it from here ), by hitting the main menu button and then select 'Save As -> PDF or XPS', select XPS and then if you double click the document from Windows explorer you will get it opened inside the IE, also if you install the XPS pack, that includes XPS generator and viewer from Microsoft site, here, you can save any file from any application as XPS, for example if you want to save a Notepad document as XPS you can select 'Print' and then you select 'Microsoft XPS Document Writer' printer, and this gets me back to the pdf995 third party application that used to install a printer driver and from any windows application you can save your file into PDF, this printer driver is installed with Vista by default, as Windows Vista is 100 % compatible with XPS standard, also XPS has a SDK, you can manage the document using its object model that's coming with .NET 3.0, and I am sure that you want to pose the question that comes to mind, what is the difference between XPS and PDF, from my perspective Microsoft released this standard to compete with PDF, nevertheless Office 2007 has built-in support for PDF standard, in a nutshell XPS is based on OpenXML standard, which implies that the XPS is no more than an OpenXML compliant package; that holds so many XML files, in turn this means that you can edit the document contents in a text editor such as Notepad, ain't that cool !, however if you are eager to get a complete sheet that compares both standards you can check this blog post http://www.amyuni.com/blog/?p=8 , and soon one white paper will be released that addresses all the pros and cons of each, but I think Microsoft will give a great support for XPS in the next generation of her products; for me as an OpenXML fan; I think XPS is more manageable for developers!, to get started with XPS you can visit the official Microsoft XPS site at : http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx, and it's worth mentioning that the XPS is coming by default with the .NET Framework 3.0, so if you have it installed no need to get the XPS pack.

Note: I have saved one bulky word file as XPS, then I opened it in IE, loading was so fast, and also I found no margins or formatting issues, also search was so performant, navigating from one page to another was unexpectedly fast, one more thing else to add; Microsoft is providing most of documents on her site as XPS by providing a link about what XPS is, downloading the generator and viewer, go and get it , use it , I am sure you will like it!.