Jerry Dunietz - XML Paper Specification

Orbit, my understanding is that the Microsoft Office 12 native format will use XPS packages to hold the XML parts and other elements (images, etc.).  I suppose you could have the word document and an XPS (Reach) Document side-by-side in the same package if that was useful for shipping around. 

The greater value may be that this is also how PowerPoint and Excel will do it, and there is room for many custom document-oriented and maybe developer-oriented uses.  (I would love to see it as a carrier for the components of a build/project, for example.)

I think the use of "Paper" is too narrow, but it seems that a lot of the wood behind this particular arrow is oriented to production printing models, although it could be nifty in the multi-function space too.  It'll be interesting to see the next cut of the specification.

LarryOsterman wrote:

Btw, Jerry's been at MS for about 2 years longer than I have

I thought you helped build the first Microsoft building? Guess he helped tip the cement into the foundation then

When you had the Word & XPS docs side-by-side, you comment that the XPS version looks better. This is due to the new hinting system in Vista right? So that particular font is optimized for the screen. When this same font is used to render the doc onto the printer, would the screen-optimized font somehow adversely affect the printer output?

Edit: Nevermind, I realized that's more of the font design & XAML rendering function than XPS.

Could it be, that the MS Download servers act  with a slight bias. I'm downloading the video on my Mac using Safari. I'm getting 3kB. So I soptted the DL. When I fire up the good ol Connectix VirutalPC running W2k I get an astonishing 230kB. Stopping it and going back to Safari gets me the old 3kB. What's the deal here? I noticed that on the last 2 videos I DL'ed as well. (The Ken Levy foxPro and on route to steves office)

Were you downloading vs. watching? They could come from 2 different servers.

Is Metro going to be an open standard?

I noticed on the side-by-side comparison between Word and Metro, they were slightly different.  Why is there a box around the text under the title in the Word version and no box in Metro?

nsingh wrote:

I noticed on the side-by-side comparison between Word and Metro, they were slightly different.  Why is there a box around the text under the title in the Word version and no box in Metro?

Probably a table cell. Those can have printable borders or not, and I guess since XPS is printer-oriented, it didn't show the border.

Matt0210: I had the same experience downloading (I never got much over 2.5kB/s on a 1.5mbps DSL line) and I was using Internet Explorer 6.0.  This morning I finally killed it after only getting 130MB of the thing downloaded overnight.  So I don't have a local copy for careful review and I haven't managed to watch it either.  Bummer.  It looks like downloading is throttled and streaming isn't (makes sense), but it could just be congestion. 

I gave up because I was avoiding doing my real work out of concern for losing the connection.  So I tossed the connection and I'll try again another time.

Knowing the file size in advance would have helped me deal with this.  I sent a note to Robert Scoble requesting that for Channel 9 videos.

Charles wrote:

Orbit86 wrote: whats with the humming?

There was construction happening on the floor above us. Strange sound, no? Wonder what they were working on...

C

Lol, viewing the wmv at the moment and I was wondered what the harddrive on the background was doing and how large that pc was which made the noise. But it's construction.

For me to use this format there will need to be.

• A free (fast) viewer for the max
• A free (fast) viewer for latex
• A free (fast) viewer for firefox
• A free (fast) viewer for old version of Windows (95, 98, NT 4 etc)
• A viewer that will run on most versions of unix, may be java as I don’t care if it is slow.

 

A free web-page service to convert XML-Paper documents into PDF documents.

 

Otherwise I would not know that the person I was sending a document to would be able to read it.

Orbit86 wrote:

I still don't know why you would need XPS when you have Word and PDF..

but yet again this is Microsoft's way of not letting you choose other people's software

I don't see anything here prohibiting you from using Word and PDF now or in the future.

Now MS pretending PDF doesn't exist I can see (it was kind of funny to listen to this video describing Metro as if nothing like this has ever been done before, right down to the amazing printer driver that creates a document!).

Then again, I couldn't see MS integrating PDF creation like Apple and the Linux desktops do without being slapped with a long and hard lawsuit from Adobe for unfairly crushing their Acrobat Elements OEM business.

Orbit86 wrote:

I still don't know why you would need XPS when you have Word and PDF..

Word cost $$$ and XPS viewers will be free on Windows platform 'cuz they should be easy to implement. XPS should be better than PDF in preserving the printout 'cuz it's more intimate with GDI. Plus, I don't know if the PDF specs are opened or not.

Orbit86 wrote:

you have a Word Viewer on Microsoft.com

you need Windows ($$) to use XPS, will it be cross platform or just Windows?

It should be cross-platform, but I doubt MS will write viewers for other platforms (except maybe Mac OS X). 3rd parties can do that if they want.

Metro Spec

PDF Spec

Orbit86 wrote:

btw thanks..

is that a Mac Mini for your avator?

Yep.

And no the Intel mods are not permanent. I'm not that heartless.

Orbit86 wrote:

do you use the mac mini?

Sometimes. I used it for web surfing and RSS reading as much as I could when I first got it (the wonderful sleep implementation made that quite easy when my main machine was off), but eventually gravitated back to my primary XP machine.

I've wanted to run Mac OS X on something since it first went public, but didn't want another monitor on my desk. When the mini was announced it was the perfect solution and I snapped one up (the low end model but with 512MB RAM) the day it went on sale before the RDF wore off.

I'll still fire it up on occasion, especially if I want to check how they did something in the UI. It's running Tiger now too so there's that to play with. But it is vying with my Vista test box for the secondary inputs on my monitor so the laziness factor has impacted my Mac usage somewhat.

If it weren't for .Net programming, Rhapsody music service, and World of Warcraft (it runs on Macs but my PC is so much better a gaming machine), I could see using it full time.