Windows XPS versus PDF
XPS is to be the new printing and imaging engine for Windows. It is anticipated to be available sometime within 2006 or early 2007 and will be made available for current and future Windows versions. The goal of XPS is to provide a modern, fast, extensible, and feature-rich workflow for imaging that compares to the depth and quality of Adobe's solutions. XPS intends to integrate intimately with the Windows operating system to provide a simpler printing experience for users that offers more flexible and higher quality results than the system it is replacing.
In its initial release XPS will likely not be as robust and feature-rich as the current iterations of Postscript and PDF. It will, however, in some ways have a more intelligent design, having the luxury to be designed from scratch using modern techniques and formats such as XML. XPS will be a dramatic improvement for Windows system, providing a solution that is very similar to the Quartz imaging system found in Mac OS X. Apple's Quartz is based heavily on PDF, adding Apple enhancements for transparency, processing through the high performance graphics cards and integration with Apple's ColorSync color calibration system.
In the Graphic Arts industry, XPS will greatly improve publishing from Windows computers. RIPs will need to be upgraded to provide not only Postscript and PDF support they have today but also the ability to RIP XPS files.
Adobe and Apple will respond to the new threat of this technology from Microsoft. Adobe has already shown some of its reaction with the purchase of Macromedia to capture the highly popular Flash platform. Integrating the features of Flash and PDF along with additional format modernization to be conducted by Adobe will result in future updates to Adobe's Acrobat products to likely provide more dynamic and expansive improvements between versions than was peviously the case when no real competition for the platform existed. A comparision can be made to the early 1990s when Apple and Microsoft teamed up to create the Truetype format to which Adobe responded with a slew of creative new products along with an opening of their Type 1 format in order to maintain their position in the market. At least the same level of creative reaction can be anticipated at this time from Adobe.
XPS brings comparably advanced features to Windows that have been enjoyed by Apple users for some time. This should benefit Macintosh users directly as Apple and Adobe work to improve technologies for the Macintosh to maintain Adobe and Apple's hold on the publishing market. We can all expect a new gold age of creativity for publishing over the next few years as a result.
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