XPS
The XML Paper Specification (XPS), formerly codenamed "Metro", is a specification for a page description language and a fixed-document format developed by Microsoft.
[edit] Overview
It is an XML-based (more precisely XAML-based) specification, based on a new print path and a color-managed vector-based document format which supports device independence and resolution independence.
The XPS document format consists of structured XML markup that defines the layout of a document and the visual appearance of each page, along with rendering rules for distributing, archiving, rendering, processing and printing the documents. Notably, the markup language for XPS is a subset of XAML, allowing it to incorporate vector-graphic elements in documents, using XAML to mark up the WPF primitives. The elements used are described in terms of paths and other geometrical primitives.
XPS is similar to PDF and PostScript in that it is a fixed sized display format
An XPS file is a ZIP archive using the Open Packaging Convention, which contains the files which make up the document. These include an XML markup file for each page, text, embedded fonts, raster images, 2D vector graphics, as well as the digital rights management information. The contents of an XPS file can be examined simply by opening it in an application which supports ZIP files.
