XPS Review

Madcap Software recently announced MadCap Capture™ which permits users to perform a screen capture and display results. The application is capable of saving screen captures in XPS format as well as other render file formats including HD Photo. The application can also load XPS documents, but unfortunately only works with XPS documents created by the application. That is a pity since the Capture UI would be great as a default viewer.

After assessing a screen capture saved in the application as an XPS document, it appears that Capture saves the image in PNG format. The application does not appear to permit the user to the change default image format saved in the XPS document. The application does permits the user to create text callouts and image page objects, which are saved as separate part resources in the XPS documents rather than incorporating them into the image file. This is useful feature if you have to remove these callouts at a later date and takes advantage of the capabilities of XPS.

Pagemark Technology recently posted a insightful comparison of their viewer technology to other products in the market (Comparision Document). The comparison consisted of using sample XPS documents for render quality and the C-XPS Speed Suite™ for performance testing. Pagemark’s published test results indicated that their viewer processed XPS page objects faster than the new Software Imaging viewer with some render processing times being anywhere from 2-15 times faster.

C-XPS™ products have been recently added to the Microsoft’s XPS Showcase. C-XPS Render™ and C-XPS Speed Suite™ are designed to quickly and accurately assess the quality and performance of Microsoft XPS applications.

XPS Associates, Inc. (XPSA) has recently launched C-XPS™ Render, which determines if a Microsoft® XPS-enabled application can accurately render, convert, display, or print XPS documents. Errors within an application can be easily detected by either using the target’s built-in self diagnostic features or comparing results to a supplied TIFF reference file.

The target utilizes 63 individual test elements with typical page objects found XPS documents including:

• Vectors, Glyphs, and Fill Brushes (Solid Color, Image, and Visual)
• 8 and 16 bit RGB images in JPG, PNG, TIFF, and Microsoft® HD Photo formats with and without alpha channels
• Various types of opacity masks and transparencies that can be used in XPS page markup
• Page objects utilizing sRGB and scRGB color syntax and ICC/WCS color profiles
• Clipping paths and Rotation (Render Transform) of page objects.
• Resource Dictionaries

Software developers, system integrators, and end users working with XPS technology will find the C-XPS Render™ Target to be an effective tool for checking rendered, displayed, or converted output using a single page document.

C-XPS Render™ Pro is also available which contains 16 XPS documents with the individual rows and columns from the C-XPS Render™ target for advanced application troubleshooting.

XPSA is also launching C-XPS Speed Suite™ which measures the performance of XPS applications in rendering, converting, displaying and printing documents. This product provides 27 sets of targets designed to specifically measure performance with a range of XPS objects and highlights potential performance problem areas with applications.

More information about C-XPS can be found at www.c-xps.com.

XPS Review Summary

Software Imaging Limited
Company Site
XPS Viewer

Pros: Easy to use user interface. Anti-aliasing and color profile selection options for viewing. Able to render simple and complex XPS page objects. Great performance for processing documents with text and simple vector graphics compared to the IE XPS viewer. Available for 32 and 64 versions of Vista, XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003.

Cons: 32 bit version of viewer processed XPS documents containing images and gradient fills slower than the IE XPS viewer. No Mac version is available at this time.

Software Imaging recently announced their new XPS viewer, which can be downloaded for free from their website. The SWI XPS viewer, based on Software Imaging’s PrintMagicXPS™ rendering technology, comes in 32 and 64 versions for Vista, XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. Since PrintMagicXPS™ provides cross platform support, Software Imaging may consider offering a Mac and Linux version of the viewer in the future.

Viewer Appearance

The location and appearance of the controls in the viewer made it very easy to use. The SWI viewer has the capability to zoom (at fixed sizes and custom zooms up to 1000%), Fit to width/height, fit to page as well as page rotation.

SWI XPS Viewer Toolbar

The viewer also has two unique features compared to the Internet Explorer XPS Viewer (IE XPS viewer) worth noting. The first is the ability to enable/disable anti-aliasing to the rendered image. This is a useful feature if you wish to get a quick preview or see differences in text/line quality. The second is the option to apply specific ICC color profiles to the rendered output. This makes it possible to view and presumably print the rendered color output in other color gamuts other than sRGB, which is the default color space for XPS. They also provide the capability to change the desired rendering intent. Two great feature to add to a free viewer!

The viewer can be launched from the command line as well using
XPSViewer.exe (XPS Document name).

Render Quality

In terms of quality, we compared the Software Imaging viewer to the XPS viewer in Internet Explorer and the Brava! Reader, another free XPS enabled viewer from Informative Graphics. Viewer quality was checked using the C-XPS Render™ Pro test documents.

Our test indicated that the Software Imaging Viewer successfully processed simple as well as complex page objects and produced results similar to the IE XPS viewer. This included Visual Brushes, 8 and 16 bit images, objects using transparency, dashed line segments and complicated path (vector) figures. This was not the case for the Brava! Reader (See examples below).

Examples of rendered objects from the C-XPS Render document using the three viewers. Note rendering errors in the glyphs, vector objects, dashed line segments, and visual brush fills found with the Brava! Reader.

While the Brava! Reader could only render 68% of target elements on the C-XPS Render document, the Software Imaging viewer and IE XPS viewer rendered all objects correctly.

Viewer Performance

The processing times to render various imaging primitives were also evaluated using the C-XPS Speed Suite™ test documents. Based on results from a system using a 32 Bit version of Vista Home Premium, the Software Imaging viewer processed glyphs and paths unfilled and with solid color brushes significantly faster than the IE viewer and Brava! Reader. The IE viewer performed better than the Software Imaging viewer when processing gradient fills and most 8 and 16 bit image formats. The Brava! Reader had slightly better results than the IE viewer for glyphs and simple vector page objects, but exhibited very poor results with documents containing images (Some documents took approximately one minute to render compared to approximately 7 to 20 seconds for the IE and Software Imaging viewers).

Though not tested, performance is assumed to be better using the 64 Bit version since PrintMagicXPS™ can take full advantage of dual core processors.

Summary

The Software Imaging XPS Viewer is a great alternative to the XPS viewer in Internet Explorer. The ability to modify anti-aliasing and color profile settings are super features for professional users. The viewer’s rendering capabilities appear to be comparable to the IE XPS viewer and the rendering performance proved to be better than the IE viewer for mostly text based documents with simple vector graphics. The only main downside found in the 32 bit version was in processing speed for documents containing images and gradient fills which was slightly worse than the IE XPS viewer. Based on the tests, the Software Imaging is hands down better than the Brava! Reader both in rendering quality and performance.

A free Mac version of the viewer would also be great to have especially if the rendering quality and performance is comparable to the Windows version.