HP said it will release some XPS drivers this year. They are looking both at creating software drivers to enable XPS printing and document creation, he said, as well as creating high-performance firmware on more expensive scanners and printers. "I have to give them credit, they seem to be doing things right."Īccording to Jollota, 80% of QualityLogic’s hardware clients are testing XPS support now. "They are throwing a lot of internal resources behind this initiative," Jollota said. This time around, Microsoft began quietly talking to potential partners as early as two years ago. Porter, who was working for another company at the time, recalls being present at a meeting where an enraged executive from an unnamed Japanese printer maker threw an ashtray at a Microsoft executive after being told. Microsoft licensed WPS to a number of vendors before suddenly pulling back on it, causing a lot of ill will. Introduced around the time of Windows 95, WPS was technology that was meant to help printer manufacturers build more powerful Windows-compatible printers at a lower price. "When I first heard about XPS, I thought, ‘Here we go again,’" said Jollota, referring to a Microsoft initiative from the early 1990s called Windows Printing System. "So we’re pretty excited about XPS."įinally, Microsoft seems to be avoiding some of its past mistakes. "With PDF, I can read comments, but if I don’t have Acrobat Professional, I can’t add them," he said. XPS also offers more sophisticated digital rights management features than PDF, according to Mike Hamilton, vice president of product management at San Diego-based MadCap Software Inc., whose upcoming Blaze publishing software will support XPS documents and let users add comments to them. "If you can use the same language to put dots on the screen and put dots on paper, bypassing the conversion process, I do believe the color and the throughput will be better." By contrast, PDF documents still need to be converted to PostScript before they are printed, according to Porter. "Users have been complaining for years, ‘Why does it take so long to print? Why is the color on my screen different than what’s on my printer?’" said Dave Jollota, chief operating officer at QualityLogic Inc., a Moorpark, Calif.-based company that is helping vendors add XPS support to their products. That, says Microsoft, allows it accelerate print times. Finally, XPS serves as both a file format and a printer language similar to Printer Command Language, which was developed by Hewlett-Packard Co., and PostScript, which was developed by Adobe. ![]() XPS also supposedly renders on-screen colors and images to paper better than other technologies, including PDF. For one, XPS’ use of compressed XML makes XPS documents more searchable and easier to manipulate by outside applications. Microsoft also claims a number of technical advantages for XPS. ![]() "If you want to do this with Adobe, you have to go and buy a bunch of software." "XPS is built into Windows’ APIs, and the tools to manipulate them are free," said RanDair Porter, president of Pagemark Technology Inc., a Redmond, Wash.-based company offering XPS support services. Some independent supporters say XPS’s price - it’s also being licensed for free to potential software and hardware partners - can’t be beat.
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