Saturday, April 14, 2007

XPS (XML Paper Specification) Essentials Pack Download

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack

"With the XPS Essentials Pack you can quickly begin reading and generating XPS Documents. It contains XPS Viewer EP to read XPS Documents and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer to output files to the XPS Document format.

Additionally, the XPS Essentials Pack download includes providers to enable the iPreview and iFilter capabilities found in many Windows applications. Windows shell handlers are also included to enable thumbnail views and file properties for XPS Documents.

..."

While it's still a little early for me to tell if XPS is going to "stick" [insert comments about past cool tech from MS that never got past 1.0 and has since died a quite death here ] I'm going to bet XPS has some staying power and we will be seeing it for some time to come. Personally I like seeing PDF having a modern and solid competitor (i.e. raises the bar, etc, etc).  

The pack provides a nice foundation with the generator (printer driver), viewer/reader, previewer (Office 2007, Vista) and indexer (iFilter)...

Available in Vista, XP and Win2003 32 & 64 bit versions.

(via The Road to Know Where - Microsoft Releases Support Tool for XML Documents)

No comments: