What Is XPS?

The XML Paper Specification (XPS) format is basically an electronic representation of digital documents based on XML. It is a paginated fixed-layout format that retains the look and feel of your electronic documents. As a form of electronic paper, the XPS format provides a way in which you can easily create, share, print and save digital documents. Although XPS documents can be easily created once you have the right software installed, just like the PDF, the XPS format is a difficult-to-handle format.

Interacting with an XPS document is difficult because the format is primarily focused upon document fidelity, data accuracy, file size and compression schemes, elements that are important to generating high-quality print output. Thus, XPS documents can be neither manipulated nor edited easily and can only be viewed on computer systems that have an XPS Viewer installed. As such, an XPS file is ultimately a final document format ideal for publishing, archiving and transmitting.

The format is available and accessible from within all Windows applications. Of course, one of the keys benefits of the XPS document is this integration into Windows operating systems, which makes XPS documents easy to deploy. This allows all end users to take advantage of XPS technology and the document format simply by upgrading their software.