Microsoft pushing XPS
Check out this excerpt from Jeffery Snover’s post on the PowerShell Cheat Sheet:
Given that I posted it a week before the Office 2007 launch, it turned out that not many people could read that so I posted it in PDF format as well.
It now turns out that the corporate direction is to use XPS (I’m told that XPS viewers are readily available).
Jeffrey did the right thing by posting it in PDF, because that’s what customers want. But apparently Microsoft is requiring documents be posted in XPS?
This is a political move to try to push XPS adoption, and doesn’t do any good for their customers. It’s a disappointing move by Microsoft.
Is there anyone that would rather have an XPS file than a PDF? Comment here, and say why.
(And I still like my own PowerShell Cheat Sheet - it’s not as pretty but it’s got more meat).
Update: Jeffrey posted a comment saying that he wasn’t required to use XPS; he chose to do it to support the XPS team’s efforts. That’s a much better reason to use XPS, although as a customer it’s still not the format I’d prefer.
January 31st, 2007 at 6:58 pm
It sounds like MS is pushing for XPS to become more than just a portable document format - at the WinHEC keynote when BillG first introduced it, I got the idea that they want XPS to replace the printer driver model completely. ie. Replace postscript, PCL etc.
If that happens, then an XPS document will be the format of choice for not only on-screen fidelity but also printed fidelity.
For now I’m still happy with PDFs provided Foxit can read ‘em - there’s no way I’m installing Acrobat again on any PC.
January 31st, 2007 at 9:01 pm
> Jeffrey did the right thing by posting it in PDF, because that’s what customers want. But apparently Microsoft is requiring documents be posted in XPS?
There was not a “requirement” to do this. Someone from that team talked to me about their XPS effort and I decided to support them.
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows PowerShell/MMC Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
February 1st, 2007 at 8:47 am
Thanks Jeffrey - that’s good to know, although with MS doing things like posting EXEs with nothing but Word docs in them, you do have a history of tying documents that could be perfectly portable to Windows, so it’s natural to be suspicious.
I’ll update the post.
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
XPS is a new file format that will be very popular one day with windows users who want to save and share documents using Microsoft/windows only applications and technology - once desktop printers ship that can print XPS, a segment of the population will be happy to never buy or use Adobe anything to create, exchange and print files. Our experience thus far is that XPS version 1 is about on par with early versions of Acrobat PDF files - in some ways far more advance then version 1 that shipped in 1993, but in other ways not much better - without a real ecosystem, (no cross platform viewers and no XPS editors) it would be silly for anyone to ‘demand’ a file be exchanged or posted as XPS ‘only’ for the next year or two.
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
It was even more silly to post Word doc files in self-extracting archives (*.exe files), but that’s what Microsoft did for a long time.