[Desktop_printing] Microsoft XPS specification

Raph Levien raph.levien at gmail.com
Tue Apr 11 13:41:19 PDT 2006


> Thanks - the last time I read of metro, I thought it was some vapourware
> to spit adobe.

It isn't exactly vaporware, although I have little doubt that the
primary purpose is to spit adobe.

> Is there any open-source support for xps yet? I suppose the first party
> to support it would be openoffice (with a somewhat corporate/commercial
> interest), if it happens outside microsoft.

We (the Ghostscript team) have a very aggressive implementation
project underway. We have not yet decided on the licensing for the
release, and, indeed, Microsoft has not yet released the details of
their licenses for the XPS spec itself and the various
subspecifications needed to implement it fully, such as their enhanced
JPEG-like compression format (WMP) and their color architecture (WCS).

I believe Microsoft intends their XPS viewer largely to displace
Acrobat largely as a tool for reading documents posted on the Web.
Thus, I would tend to guess that a lot of the initial movement from
the free software community would come from the Web browsers. That
community has, to our frustration, never integrated any Ghostscript
technology, and the Gnome viewer space has also forsaken Ghostscript
in favor of various forks of xpdf. This experience has left me less
than wildly enthusiastic about expecting positive results from a
collaboration, but if somebody in the viewer/browser space wanted to
work with us and would hold up their end, we'd be happy to work with
them. In any case, there isn't any _hurry_ for the free software
community to respond to XPS, but it's definitely worth learning more
about.

Raph




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