Creating XPS documents from PowerPoint 2007

With XPS still in its infancy, it is important for early adopters of the format to be aware that how one generates the document impacts the final result. A case in point is with regards to converting Powerpoint 2007 documents to XPS. In a recent test, a PowerPoint 2007 presentation generated for a widescreen (16x9) was converted to XPS using the "Save as XPS" option in Office 2007 and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer.

PowerPoint 2007 Slide Example

The "Save as" option produced produced output similar to the results from PowerPoint.

XPS Document using “Save As XPS”

Producing the same document with the XPS Document Writer, however, required the user to be aware of the print dialog settings within PowerPoint and produced different results. Using the default print settings produced a cropped version of the slide, which was anticipated, but unexpectedly corrupted the output. The reflection under the logo on the left side was incorrectly rendered as were the two logo images. The text bounding box for the bulleted items was also visible.

Microsoft XPS Document Writer with default print settings.

Checking the "Scale to fit paper" option in the print dialog correctly fit the slide onto the page and resolved the rendition issues.

Microsoft XPS Document Writer with “Scale to fit paper” settings.

Given the number of features within XPS to produce excellent documents for printing or archiving, it is a pity that neither the “Save as XPS” option nor the XPS Document Writer take advantage of these capabilities. The limited options they do provide are also not consistent with the two creation methods. The “Save as XPS” dialog focuses primarily on the document structure and non-printing related tags. The Document Writer on the other hand provides image compression and format, and document interleaving options, both of which would be useful with the “Save as XPS” method. It is expected that once more printer manufacturers offer XPS native printer solutions and Office migrates to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the number of document creation capabilities will expand.

For software developers offering XPS output solutions, the results show that it is critical to test their implementations with different types of files under different printing conditions to ensure the best quality results.

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As a side note, the “Save as PDF” in Office 2007 produced inferior and unacceptable output results compared saving the results with Acrobat 8. As seen in the screen shots below, the "Save as PDF" output incorrectly displays the logo and reflection regions.

“Save as PDF” option in PowerPoint 2007

PDF created with Acrobat 8