The XPS document format is one of the most half-baked attempts to destroy a competitor that Microsoft have ever made.
Designed to counter Adobe PDF’s dominance of the portable document market, it was introduced with Vista and has never caught on, despite the XPS Document Writer setting itself as the default printer on any new install of Windows. This is partly because the reader software for XPS is (for no good reason) a plugin for Internet Explorer, which means that when you open an XPS document, it opens your web browser. If you are one of the 34% of people in the world not using Internet Explorer as your web browser, then the plugin never runs and you can’t open the document. This has been changed in Windows 7, but it’s too little, too late.
All of this is a shame, because Adobe Acrobat is a bug-ridden and overpriced piece of junk that is more bloated than a lactose-intolerant hippopotamus after eating a metric tonne of Stilton. Microsoft Office and Windows Vista are often accused of this; Acrobat is worse than both of them. Combined. I’d be quite happy for Microsoft to crush Adobe PDF utterly, but if XPS is their answer, they are going to fail miserably.
But, I digress. Today I discovered that the XPS system in Windows not only hates anyone not using Internet Explorer, it also hates anyone not in the United States. Regardless of the locale Windows is installed using, it will always set itself to create documents using US Letter sized paper by default. Very few printer drivers have this problem, even ones made by HP. It’s a schoolboy error, and an extremely irritating one at that. Almost any printer driver made in the last 5 years will have the common decency to recognise when the user has set a locale other than United States, and set the default paper size accordingly (to A4, if you are in Europe).
You might think this would only affect you if you were stupid enough to actually create an XPS document. You would be wrong. Because it sets itself as the default printer, it affects the default page setup of a multitude of programs. In the case of Microsoft Office 2007, the problem goes deeper still. Even if your Office document is set to a different paper size, when you try to save a PDF (yes, a PDF, not an XPS document), it will end up sized as Letter paper, because the paper size is being read from the default printer. Incredibly, this even happens if you use the Adobe Acrobat PDF writer plugin, and not just the Microsoft one that comes with Office 2007.
I wasted a good 45 minutes today trying to work out why all my PDFs were coming out on Letter paper. There was much swearing and gnashing of teeth. When I discovered the cause, let us just say that I was… displeased.
You can download the XPS Essentials pack for Vista :)
True, but it’s an extra step that the vast majority of people won’t bother with (or know about), and it doesn’t fix the more annoying paper size issue.
Ok wait, you mean to tell me that all printers installed derive their paper size settings from this bogus pseudo printer driver? This would explain a few things I’ve seen in the past.
If this is true, has anyone given ANY thought to how much paper is wasted in the UK and other golden-section-paper-ratio loving countries due to margins getting messed up, not to mention the millions on European technician man-hours devoted to the troubleshooting process where one has to filemon printer drivers just to work out why they weren’t designed properly because they don’t allow standard users to change basic settings, then invest heavily in the time it takes to loosen up group policy settings to allow some other fudged setting that somehow solves this problem according to an obscure article found on some printer driver user forum translated from german, only to find the problem magically comes back exactly 6 weeks later…
Arggghghghgh, the software is designed properly, so how hard is it to design implementations of settings properly?!
I think it only affects the print setup within applications, not on the other printer objects on the system, and only if the XPS Document Writer is still the default. But yes, the general asshattery with US Letter has probably wasted more IT Support time outside of the US than any other issue in history.
Talking about Acrobat, I particularly like the way that it fails to uninstall previous versions of Acrobat reader resulting in me having to manually uninstall Acrobat reader versions 4 through 7 from various machines quite regularly.