XPS to PDF Converter Online
XPS was Microsoft's answer to PDF, and it lost. What remains is a long tail of files produced by the virtual printer that shipped in Windows for a decade, sitting in archives and shared drives, increasingly hard to open on the machines that made them.
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Add to Chrome — freeDrop your XPS file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Page geometry, text and vector art transfer exactly
- Multi-page documents convert in one pass
- Handles .xps and the later OpenXPS variant
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use XPS to PDF
- 1
Add the XPS
Usually something printed to "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" years ago — an invoice, a scanned form, a report someone archived before PDF export was in every application.
- 2
Convert
The document is rendered by a dedicated XPS engine on our server and written out as PDF. It runs in a second or two for typical page counts.
- 3
Open it anywhere
The result is an ordinary PDF, readable in any browser, phone, e-reader or viewer, with no Windows component required.
How it works
How to convert an XPS file to PDF
The document is opened by a rendering engine built specifically for XPS, which walks the fixed pages and re-emits their contents as PDF drawing operations.
If you need an image rather than a document, use the XPS to PNG converter or XPS to JPG converter. Once the file is a PDF, you can also extract its text for searching or reuse.
Nothing is screenshotted. Text stays as text, vector shapes stay as vectors, and embedded images pass through as images. The result is a PDF of the same generation of quality as the original, not a picture of one.
Why the format exists at all
XPS arrived in 2006 alongside a broader push to replace document standards Microsoft did not control. Underneath, it is a ZIP archive of XML: one file per page, describing glyphs and paths at absolute coordinates, with fonts and images stored alongside as parts of the package.
That is a genuinely clean design, and cleaner in places than PDF, which carries decades of accumulated features. It made no difference. PDF was already everywhere, every platform could read it, and nobody needed a second fixed-layout format. XPS survived as a print-to-file default rather than as a choice, which is exactly the kind of adoption that evaporates the moment the default changes.
What this conversion is good for
Reading an archived file at all. The most common reason anyone lands here. The file opened fine on the machine that made it and now opens nowhere.
Sending a document to someone else. An XPS attachment is close to a dead link for most recipients, on phones especially, where nothing reads it.
Getting a file into other tools. Almost every document utility — merging, signing, page extraction, annotation — assumes PDF as its input format. Once the document is a PDF, the rest of the toolchain opens up.
Where the conversion is genuinely faithful
The honest comparison here is with converting a PDF into an editable document, which loses layout because it has to guess at structure that was never recorded. This conversion has no equivalent guess to make. Both formats answer the same question — what marks go where on a fixed page — so the translation is mechanical.
The things that can differ are peripheral: document properties, digital signatures, and any print-ticket settings the original carried. Those describe the file rather than the page, and they do not survive.
If the file will not convert
XPS files produced by third-party printer drivers are occasionally malformed in ways the Windows viewer tolerated and a strict reader will not. If a file is rejected, opening it on a machine with the XPS Viewer feature enabled and printing it to PDF from there is the reliable fallback.
Getting XPS Viewer back is a two-minute job on Windows 10 and 11, and there are readers for macOS and Linux too — with a caveat about OpenXPS worth knowing before you install one. How to open XPS files covers both.
If you want an image rather than a document, XPS to JPG and XPS to PNG render page one instead.
If you already have XPS Viewer
Windows can do this without a converter: open the file in XPS Viewer, choose Print, and pick "Microsoft Print to PDF" as the printer. For a single file on a machine where the viewer is already installed, that is the shortest path and there is no reason to upload anything.
It is worth knowing what the print route costs, because it is not nothing. Printing re-renders the document through the print pipeline, so the result is a new rendering rather than a translation. Text usually survives as text, but anything the print driver decides to rasterize arrives as pixels, and the page size shifts if the print dialog's paper setting does not match the document's.
The converter here reads the XPS package directly and re-emits its drawing operations, which is why page geometry transfers exactly rather than being reproduced. Use whichever is closer to hand: the print route when the viewer is already open, this one when it is not installed, when you are not on Windows, or when the layout has to survive intact.
If you only need to read it
Converting is the right move when you need to send the document, keep it, or be sure it will still open in five years. If you just need to look inside it once, the XPS viewer shows every page in the browser without producing a file at all.
Examples
An archived invoice
The page comes across at its original dimensions with the text still text, not a picture of text. Both formats store glyphs and vector paths, so nothing is rasterized on the way through and the result stays searchable and selectable.
A long scanned report
Barely any size change, which is the correct outcome. The pages are photographs of paper in both files; converting the wrapper around them does not and should not re-compress the images inside.
Frequently asked questions
What is an XPS file?
A fixed-layout document format Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista as a competitor to PDF. Windows shipped an "XPS Document Writer" printer for years, so any application that could print could produce one, which is how most of these files came to exist — not because anyone chose the format, but because it was the default in the print dialog.
Why can I not open it on Windows any more?
The XPS Viewer stopped being installed by default in Windows 10 version 1803, and it is now an optional feature you have to add deliberately from the system settings. Microsoft never removed the format's support entirely, but it did stop making it visible, so a file that opened by double-clicking in 2015 now presents as unknown.
Does the layout change?
No, and this is the unusual case where that promise is safe to make. Both XPS and PDF describe a page as fixed marks at fixed coordinates rather than as text that flows into a shape. There is no re-flow step to go wrong, so page breaks, margins and positioning transfer exactly rather than being reconstructed and approximated.
What about OpenXPS and .oxps files?
OpenXPS is the standardized revision of the same format, and the engine here reads both. If a file with an .oxps extension is refused, rename it to .xps and try again — the two are close enough that the extension is sometimes the only thing standing in the way.