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Some times I have to deal with XPS files (XPS is a Microsoft's rival to Adobe's PDF format, technically a zipped XAML (XML)).

Can I view them in Ubuntu? Or, maybe, I could even produce them?

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4 Answers 4

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Okular, the KDE pdf viewer, supports XPS. The package name is okular I'm not aware of any GNOME/GTK+ viewers that support XPS, though according to this evince bug in upstream GNOME support has been added. It's not working for me in Maverick....

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  • Okular did the job but Arabic characters are garbled.
    – Tarik
    May 13, 2014 at 7:52
  • Now the bug you are reporting is resolved fixed! :-)
    – luca76
    Apr 14, 2016 at 13:27
  • Okular fails on my oxps file ("Could not open file.oxps").
    – gerrit
    Mar 27, 2020 at 13:28
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Evince has XPS support now. Check: http://projects.gnome.org/evince/?guid=ON

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    Google Docs also supports this format as of February 2011: googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/…
    – Tom Brossman
    Dec 23, 2011 at 7:13
  • Did you know, MS SampleXpsDocuments archive is a Win32 executable and weights 159 MiB? :-) I am going to check the answer (to know it Evince XPS support is really usable) as soon as I find a sane XPS file to try...
    – Ivan
    Dec 27, 2011 at 5:24
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    Does Evince really support XPS? The link below the list doesn't say so. And it doesn't work here.
    – Jakob
    Mar 14, 2012 at 9:03
  • @Jakob evince upstream supports it, but the package in ubuntu does not currenty use it. It requires a package libgxps which was just included in 12.04 and to be enabled in evince package, which is underway - there is no guarantee though because we're a bit late. See askubuntu.com/questions/112852/… and "XPS not supported"
    – Savvas Radevic
    Mar 26, 2012 at 16:51
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    Evince showed my XPS file as a blank page.
    – Tarik
    May 13, 2014 at 7:55
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To me, the most suitable solution on my 12.04 computer was to convert the XPS file to PDF on the command line through

xpstopdf file.xps

and viewing the newly created file.pdf using whatever PDF viewer (acroread in my case).

This required installing the package libgxps-utils.

(Evince did not open the XPS file that I ran into, at least out of the box, but complained "File type Zip archive (application/zip) is not supported".)

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    xpstopdf crashed when invoked.
    – Tarik
    May 13, 2014 at 7:53
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    Same here - error message was "Error creating XPS file: Invalid XPS File: fixedrepresentation not found"
    – Steve Kroon
    Jul 29, 2014 at 8:08
  • Didn't work for me: (xpstopdf:87500): GLib-WARNING **: GError set over the top of a previous GError or uninitialized memory. This indicates a bug in someone's code. You must ensure an error is NULL before it's set.
    – etech
    Nov 12, 2015 at 0:12
  • Worked for me. On Ubuntu 14.0.2, great!
    – spikeyang
    Dec 17, 2015 at 7:08
  • @SteveKroon: I get that with OXPS files. Normal XPS seems to work...
    – Gert van den Berg
    Mar 7, 2016 at 12:46
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If you want to create XPS files, your best bet may be to try to build the GhostXPS component of GhostPDL (part of the Ghostscript suite); I don't know if this has ever been pacakged for Ubuntu, and I don't have first-hand experience with it.

Inkscape can both read and write .xaml files. I suppose it could even be used to convert, e.g., .pdf or .svg to .xaml. I don't know, however, whether or not it can handle .xps files directly (perhaps not).

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  • Inkskape failed to read my xps file
    – Tarik
    May 13, 2014 at 7:13

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