Paul Cunningham wrote:
> No not really, it's just out of interest as in an earlier life at Sun I
> had an interest in the 'Solaris Printing System'.
Ahr ;)
>
> So for what it's worth here is my take on XPS ....
>
> XPS will be part of MS Windows Vista (and back ported to XP) when it is
> released later this year (or whenever). This will probably make XPS
> become the defacto standard for portable documents within a number of
> years replacing PDF, ie. lots of windows PCs means lots of XPS document
> files.
That's a interesting view. But I don't see many people distribute
file s in PDF format these days, unless they only want to distribute a
read-only version. If MS is sticking to this format, this probably they
will have to wait till w2k is phased out (unless it is ported also to
it), I don't think this will win over PDF.
So, sooner rather than later, Solaris/OpenSolaris/Linux/etc will
> need a XPS viewer and method of printing XPS document files. In the
> longer term application will probably also need to be able to create XPS
> document files.
>
> From the Solaris Printing System point of view, it probably means that
> it needs to handle XPS formatted files. Solaris 9 & 10 currently use
> 'a2ps' (via foomatic-rip) to convert files to the required printer PDL.
> So I guess Solaris will wait until the opensource community has updated
> 'a2ps' to be able handle XPS before the printing system can handle it.
This will be the ideal.
>
> In the future, if companies like Global Graphics have their way, some
> printers will have XPS as their inbuilt PDL. So the Solaris Printing
> System will have to be able to convert other file formats to XPS to be
> able to print to these XPS printers. Personally I don't think that this
> is likely to happen in a big way though (but I may be wrong).
Yeah. Even if it can do it, it still want to be backward
compatible. so that can only mean more capabilities on the printers, but
still the older format will need to be supported for a while.
Thanks for your input to this, nice to see that you care about
Solaris Printing :)
-Ghee
>
> Paul
>
>>
>>
>> Paul Cunningham <paulcun at talk21.com> on Fri, 07 Apr 2006 wrote:
>>>
>>> Having listened to the desktop-discuss & printing-discuss postings
>>> for sometime I haven't seen anything about XPS (XML Paper
>>> Specification) that will be in the next release of MS Windows (and
>>> back ported to XP) ...
>>>
>>> http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/
>>> http://www.globalgraphics.com/xps/
>>> http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/XPSDrv_FilterPipe.mspx
>>> http://www.softwareimaging.com/products-services/xps/index.asp
>>>
>>> I was just wondering if there are any plans for Solaris/OpenSolaris
>>> applications and print system to support this document format/PDL?
>>>
>
