Q. What is this thing called XPS Document Writer in the printer settings on my Vista computer?
A. Like Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft’s XML Paper Specification (XPS) aims to be a digital replacement for paper. To see them, you need to have a viewer program like Adobe Reader or Microsoft’s XPS Viewer on your computer. Both PDF and XPS files retain the text, fonts and layout of the original document and let the document’s recipient see the page just as you intended it to be seen. (Microsoft has lots of additional information on its XPS technology at www.microsoft.com/xps.)
The XPS Document Writer lets you create an XPS file from a Windows program that looks just as it does on your screen. And like a PDF, you can e-mail it to other people. When you go to print, just select the Microsoft XPS Document Writer option in the box, click the Print button and then give the new .xps file a name when prompted. (Full instructions are at http://snipurl.com/228d6).
Mac users can create PDF documents in a similar way by selecting the “Save as PDF” option in the Mac OS X print dialog box.