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Ivan
Asked: 2010-10-04 20:17:45 +0800 CST

How to view an XPS file?

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Some times I have to deal with XPS files (XPS is a Microsoft's rival to Adobe's PDF format, technically a zipped XAML (XML)).

Can I view them in Ubuntu? Or, maybe, I could even produce them?

xps-file

4 Answers

  1. Okular, the KDE pdf viewer, supports XPS. The package name is okular I'm not aware of any GNOME/GTK+ viewers that support XPS, though according to this evince bug in upstream GNOME support has been added. It's not working for me in Maverick....

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  2. Evince has XPS support now. Check: http://projects.gnome.org/evince/?guid=ON

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  3. To me, the most suitable solution on my 12.04 computer was to convert the XPS file to PDF on the command line through

    xpstopdf file.xps

    and viewing the newly created file.pdf using whatever PDF viewer (acroread in my case).

    This required installing the package libgxps-utils.

    (Evince did not open the XPS file that I ran into, at least out of the box, but complained "File type Zip archive (application/zip) is not supported".)

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  4. If you want to create XPS files, your best bet may be to try to build the GhostXPS component of GhostPDL (part of the Ghostscript suite); I don't know if this has ever been pacakged for Ubuntu, and I don't have first-hand experience with it.

    Inkscape can both read and write .xaml files. I suppose it could even be used to convert, e.g., .pdf or .svg to .xaml. I don't know, however, whether or not it can handle .xps files directly (perhaps not).

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