.OXPS

Introduction

OpenXPS is the standardised form of Microsoft’s XPS, published by Ecma International as ECMA-388 in 2009. Windows 8 and later save to OpenXPS when printing to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer, which is why many people meet .oxps files they did not mean to create.

Some older XPS software cannot open OpenXPS files, and Windows 7 cannot open them without conversion.

Structure

OpenXPS has the same layout as XPS: a ZIP package following the Open Packaging Conventions, with a fixed document sequence that lists fixed documents, which list fixed pages written in XML. The main difference is the XML namespaces and content types, which name the ECMA-388 schemas instead of Microsoft’s original ones, so a reader can tell the two apart from [Content_Types].xml or the root element of a page.

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