Apr
18
2008
EFI recently announced plans to demonstrate their latest Fiery technology with Microsoft® XPS support at DRUPA 2008. Based on their press release, the technology, developed in-house for working with XPS documents, provides consistent color management between XPS documents and their Adobe® PDF Print Engine (APPE) and optimizes document file size and document rendering.
This announcement is a good sign for users planning to incorporate Microsoft XPS technology into their printing and production workflow.
Feb
19
2008
The actually printed resolution of images from a Microsoft XPS document can be different depending on the producer of the XPS document. NiXPS wrote an excellent article on how to prevent images from being reduced to 96 dpi in the Word and Powerpoint.
While images can be embedded in the document at resolutions of 220 dpi, Microsoft’s “Save as XPS” tool unfortunately creates the page such that images are printed at lower resolutions. Using tools such as QualityLogic’s XPS eXaminer application one can look at the details of the document layout (called FixedPage markup in XPS terminology). I find it easier to use this tool rather than unzipping the XPS document and looking at the markup with an XML editor or Microsoft’s XamlPad.
Screenshot from XPS eXaminer
One of the first things seen in the markup is that the XPS documents are generated with a canvas render.transform (see below).
Page Markup from XPS Document with the RenderTransform
Without going into the details of the XML syntax, the render transform shown increases the size of the document by 33%.
This scaling apparently is done to compensate for the page unit differences between traditional printing which works in points (1/72″) and the native XPS page unit size of 1/96″ and allows the glyphs to be defined in point sizes in the XPS document.
While scaling makes it easier to define text in a manner common for printing, the negative side effect is that the image size and resolution are also scaled in the document by one third. Hence an image saved with a resolution of 220 dpi in the actual XPS document is printed at an actual resolution of approximately 165 dpi.
A solution to this issue would be to not apply scaling and define the glyphs sizes at the native XPS resolution. This is a change that would need to be done either by Microsoft to the “Save as XPS” and XPS Document Writer tools or in the future using an XPS preflight application.
Jan
12
2008
With XPS still in its infancy, it is important for early adopters of the format to be aware that how one generates the document impacts the final result. A case in point is with regards to converting Powerpoint 2007 documents to XPS. In a recent test, a PowerPoint 2007 presentation generated for a widescreen (16×9) was converted to XPS using the “Save as XPS” option in Office 2007 and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer.
PowerPoint 2007 Slide Example
The “Save as” option produced produced output similar to the results from PowerPoint.
XPS Document using “Save As XPS”
Producing the same document with the XPS Document Writer, however, required the user to be aware of the print dialog settings within PowerPoint and produced different results. Using the default print settings produced a cropped version of the slide, which was anticipated, but unexpectedly corrupted the output. The reflection under the logo on the left side was incorrectly rendered as were the two logo images. The text bounding box for the bulleted items was also visible.
Microsoft XPS Document Writer with default print settings.
Checking the “Scale to fit paper” option in the print dialog correctly fit the slide onto the page and resolved the rendition issues.
Microsoft XPS Document Writer with “Scale to fit paper” settings.
Given the number of features within XPS to produce excellent documents for printing or archiving, it is a pity that neither the “Save as XPS” option nor the XPS Document Writer take advantage of these capabilities. The limited options they do provide are also not consistent with the two creation methods. The “Save as XPS” dialog focuses primarily on the document structure and non-printing related tags. The Document Writer on the other hand provides image compression and format, and document interleaving options, both of which would be useful with the “Save as XPS” method. It is expected that once more printer manufacturers offer XPS native printer solutions and Office migrates to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the number of document creation capabilities will expand.
For software developers offering XPS output solutions, the results show that it is critical to test their implementations with different types of files under different printing conditions to ensure the best quality results.
As a side note, the “Save as PDF” in Office 2007 produced inferior and unacceptable output results compared saving the results with Acrobat 8. As seen in the screen shots below, the “Save as PDF” output incorrectly displays the logo and reflection regions.
“Save as PDF” option in PowerPoint 2007
PDF created with Acrobat 8
Nov
28
2007
I recently met with Jon Williams, Group Product Manager with Software Imaging, to discuss some of the products and tools developed by the company for XPS.
Jon stated that Software Imaging offers three XPS-related solutions: Sorcerer, PrintMagic XPS, and the Component Driver Architecture (CDA). The Sorcerer/CDA driver development tools provide the fastest route to handle XPS for printers that already have Windows drivers. Sorcerer is specifically designed to assist customers with raster based printers and to create Vista XPSDrv drivers using their existing printer drivers. CDA on the other hand permits customers with a PDL (e.g. PCL/XL) or PostScript to convert from XPS to their PDL Devices. The driver toolkit is designed to achieve the most reliable XPS output with existing on-board PCL XL or PostScript controllers, as well as also supporting on board XPS controllers. The driver developer can therefore easily support existing PDLs and their new XPS controller from the same toolkit. This is a critical point given, as Jon pointed out, that “more emphasis to date has been placed on offering XPS controllers. While these are important, printer manufacturers today are more in need of tools to quickly implement XPSDrv drivers into their driver sets.”
In addition to Sorcerer and CDA, PrintMagic XPS provides customers with a rendering solution for XPS documents. Jon explained that one of the advantages of using PrintMagic XPS is that customers can use the product to quickly support XPS without changing their existing RIP technology. The renderer itself fully supports some of the unique features of the XPS format, such as the HD Photo format and WCS color profiles.
Jon discussed his opinions about the direction of XPS in the market. XPS adoption will mostly occur first as Vista becomes more prevalent in the mass market, since XPS and tools such as the XPS viewer are free. The volume of XPS documents produced by consumers will be relatively small especially for print. Corporate takeup of XPS will follow approximately 12-18 months after this period. While the corporate market currently utilizes PDF and Acrobat, the fact that XPS is “in the box” will make it an interesting alternative for file sharing and archiving. As corporate adoption increases, printers will start seeing jobs coming to them in XPS format and will require solutions for handling the new format. With regards to PDF, XPS may initially be a threat mainly with regards to document archiving.
Jon indicated that the other segments for XPS include the prosumer digital printing and engineering/technical drawing markets. Prosumers will find that XPS in combination with HD Photo produces higher quality color output than achieved using traditional file formats such as TIFF or JPEG with the Windows GDI driver. Secondly, Autodesk, a leading provider of 3D CAD and engineering design software, developed a conversion file format, DWFx, which is compatible with the Windows XPS viewer.
Nov
09
2007
A compiled list of products enabled to work with the Microsoft XPS format can now be found in the links section of XPS Review.
