Microsoft created the XPS document format to take some share of the Adobe’s ever popular PDF documents market, but has not become very successful. The XPS documents never became very popular and you would seldom find any non-Microsoft website offering XPS document downloads. It looks like that the PDF documents are going to stay a de facto standard of distributing brochures, manuals, books, pamphlets etc., electronically over the internet in the foreseeable future. As a consequence the internet is full of all sorts of software for the PDF documents, but there are very few tools available for the XPS documents. Even the newer versions of Microsoft’s own XPS Viewer application is missing the features to save the XPS documents in image formats. If you want to save the XPS documents into image formats then you have to use a third party application called XPS to Images Converter.
The XPS to Images Converter application is an open source application and works in Windows only. It takes the XPS document as the input and can convert it into various types of images – PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP or TIFF.
The whole user interface of the application is designed in the manner of property sheets. In order to choose the XPS document that you want to convert, you have to set the value of XPS File to the full file path of the XPS document. Then you can choose an output folder where the images shall be saved by clicking on Output Folder. You can also choose the image formats from the Image Types option.
Clicking on the Convert button will start the conversion. This actually runs the xps2img command line in the hidden background. If you want to see what is happening, then you can set the Show Command Line option in the XPS to Images Converter toolbar. After the conversion, you can find the images in the output folder.
There are other options which are not essential for the conversion. For example, you can set After Conversion option to automatically shutdown, hibernate or restart your Windows PC after the XPS to images conversion has been completed. You can also choose a desired image DPI and size in the options.
Conclusion: If you want to edit the XPS documents then the best free choice is to convert them to images and then edit the images in your favorite image editor. You can use the free XPS to Images Converter application to convert the XPS documents into images of various formats.
You can download the XPS to Images Converter from sourceforge.net/projects/xps2img/.