XPS / OpenXPS converter
Open and convert Microsoft XPS and OpenXPS files without an XPS viewer: PDF with selectable text and embedded fonts, or PNG and JPG page images.
.xps · .oxps
Format
About XPS / OpenXPS
XPS (XML Paper Specification) is Microsoft's fixed-page format, introduced with Windows Vista as an alternative to PDF. An .xps file is a ZIP package: each page is an XML description of glyphs, paths and images, the fonts it uses are stored inside the package in a lightly scrambled form, and a FixedDocumentSequence part lists the documents and pages in order. Nothing reflows; a page looks the same wherever it is opened.
Most XPS files today were never meant to be XPS. They come from the "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" printer, which Windows offers next to real printers, so someone who meant to print a receipt, a bank statement or a report saved it as XPS instead. Office's Save as XPS is the other common source. Since Windows 8 the Document Writer saves OpenXPS (.oxps), the ECMA-388 standard form, which uses new XML namespaces but describes pages the same way. Older tools that only know .xps, including the Windows 7 viewer, can refuse .oxps files.
The practical problem is opening the file. macOS, iOS and Android have no XPS viewer, and Windows itself stopped installing XPS Viewer by default around 2018, so the person who receives an .xps often cannot see it. Converting to PDF is the usual fix. Because the XPS already contains its fonts and exact glyph positions, a PDF made from it keeps the page size, the line breaks and selectable text; in our tests the only things left behind were print settings, the package thumbnail and, for right-to-left scripts, the exact characters you get when copying text.
We check the package before converting: a real XPS or OXPS has a FixedDocumentSequence, while a renamed .docx, .pptx or .epub does not, and those are refused with a note saying what the file is. A document whose pages are all blank is refused too, rather than returned as an empty PDF.
Convert XPS / OpenXPS to…
Common XPS / OpenXPS problems
Someone sent an .xps or .oxps file and it will not open on a Mac or phone.
Use /convert/xps-to-pdf; the PDF opens everywhere and keeps the text searchable. It handles .oxps the same way.
A receipt or statement was printed to XPS by mistake and now has to go into an expense tool that only takes images.
Use /convert/xps-to-jpg or /convert/xps-to-png with max_pages 1 for a single image of the first page.
A converter says the file is not a valid XPS document.
Some files carry the .xps extension but are Word, PowerPoint or EPUB packages; we name the real type. Open it in that program. Damaged downloads also fail here, so try fetching the file again.
Links in the converted PDF do nothing.
Some XPS-to-PDF tools rebuild pages without links. Ours copies them across; if you used another tool, convert again here or reprint from the original program with Microsoft Print to PDF.