XPS Joins PDF Support in Office 12

While it had previously been announced that Office 12 would support a "Save to PDF" function, not much had been said for the company's answer to Adobe, known as XPS. But on Friday, Office program manager Jeff Bell disclosed that documents created in version 12 can be exported into either PDF or XPS.

XPS, formerly known as Metro, is an XML-based "electronic paper" format that will allow documents to be displayed as they were saved on any platform. Many of the features of XPS mirror those in PDF, and Microsoft is working with printer manufacturers to include native support for the format - much like Adobe PostScript.