.XPS

Introduction

XPS is Microsoft’s fixed-page document format, introduced with Windows Vista in 2006 as an alternative to PDF. Windows could print any document to an XPS file through the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer, and Vista’s printing system used XPS internally. It never became common for sharing documents.

A standardised version, OpenXPS, was published by Ecma International in 2009 and became the default in Windows 8, under the extension .oxps.

Structure

An XPS file is a ZIP package that follows the Open Packaging Conventions, the same packaging used by DOCX. A fixed document sequence (.fdseq) lists one or more fixed documents (.fdoc), and each of those lists its pages (.fpage). A page is XML in a subset of the WPF markup: Glyphs elements place text with a given font, Path elements draw shapes, and images are painted through brushes. Fonts and images are stored as separate parts, and embedded fonts are usually obfuscated with a key taken from their part name.

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