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Battle Lines:
Microsoft's XPS document standard sounds and looks a lot like Adobe's industry-standard PDF format. But will it perform as well in the printing workflow? Two camps are already forming.
CHANGE MAY be good or it may be bad, but it is nearly always disruptive.
In a production workflow, that generally means that when procedures change, mistakes increase, resulting in heightened inspection vigilance. Ultimately, though, the goal is to complete the process better, faster or cheaper.
Such a change is about to occur in digital printing and prepress as the adoption rates of Windows Vista and Office Suite 2007 swell, because Vista and Office 2007 create and print files differently than other systems.
Microsoft's new document standard is the XML Paper Specification (XPS), which, like Adobe's PDF format, is supposed to create files that are viewable on any platform, regardless of where they were created. Whether you consider XPS a great improvement in quality when printing from the Windows platform or a challenge to the de facto PostScript/PDF (Portable Document Format) models used by service providers, you will undoubtedly be receiving XPS files in greater numbers. So you should understand what XPS is, recognize the files when you get them, and be able to output them.
In the Microsoft Office Suite 2007 for the Microsoft Windows Vista platform, Word, PowerPoint and Excel files can be saved as 2007 application files, backward compatible (able to be opened with earlier program versions) application files or in the new XPS format. The Windows 2007 files are not backward compatible unless you save them as such and the new XPS file format is not cross-platform compatible unless you buy a viewer (similar to Acrobat reader).
Taking Sides
The XPS format is specifically designed to work well in the Windows office market because it makes it easier to transfer files from computer to computer and printer to printer without worrying about fonts and graphic images. Sound like PDF? It should, because it offers many of the same benefits. But fans of XPS say it is better than PDF because the fonts are always embedded, the color space is larger, and it will be less expensive to implement (you don't have to invest in PDF creation software because...