Software Imaging's Solutions for XPS

I recently met with Jon Williams, Group Product Manager with Software Imaging, to discuss some of the products and tools developed by the company for XPS.

Jon stated that Software Imaging offers three XPS-related solutions: Sorcerer, PrintMagic XPS, and the Component Driver Architecture (CDA). The Sorcerer/CDA driver development tools provide the fastest route to handle XPS for printers that already have Windows drivers. Sorcerer is specifically designed to assist customers with raster based printers and to create Vista XPSDrv drivers using their existing printer drivers. CDA on the other hand permits customers with a PDL (e.g. PCL/XL) or PostScript to convert from XPS to their PDL Devices. The driver toolkit is designed to achieve the most reliable XPS output with existing on-board PCL XL or PostScript controllers, as well as also supporting on board XPS controllers. The driver developer can therefore easily support existing PDLs and their new XPS controller from the same toolkit. This is a critical point given, as Jon pointed out, that “more emphasis to date has been placed on offering XPS controllers. While these are important, printer manufacturers today are more in need of tools to quickly implement XPSDrv drivers into their driver sets.”

In addition to Sorcerer and CDA, PrintMagic XPS provides customers with a rendering solution for XPS documents. Jon explained that one of the advantages of using PrintMagic XPS is that customers can use the product to quickly support XPS without changing their existing RIP technology. The renderer itself fully supports some of the unique features of the XPS format, such as the HD Photo format and WCS color profiles.

Jon discussed his opinions about the direction of XPS in the market. XPS adoption will mostly occur first as Vista becomes more prevalent in the mass market, since XPS and tools such as the XPS viewer are free. The volume of XPS documents produced by consumers will be relatively small especially for print. Corporate takeup of XPS will follow approximately 12-18 months after this period. While the corporate market currently utilizes PDF and Acrobat, the fact that XPS is “in the box” will make it an interesting alternative for file sharing and archiving. As corporate adoption increases, printers will start seeing jobs coming to them in XPS format and will require solutions for handling the new format. With regards to PDF, XPS may initially be a threat mainly with regards to document archiving.

Jon indicated that the other segments for XPS include the prosumer digital printing and engineering/technical drawing markets. Prosumers will find that XPS in combination with HD Photo produces higher quality color output than achieved using traditional file formats such as TIFF or JPEG with the Windows GDI driver. Secondly, Autodesk, a leading provider of 3D CAD and engineering design software, developed a conversion file format, DWFx, which is compatible with the Windows XPS viewer.