Software to convert XPS to PDF

Question

Most of the tools shown when searching for "xps to pdf converter" are online. A few offline tools available require install and don't provide quality conversion. They seem to convert xps to image and then image to pdf.
I am looking for a free and portable (optional) xps converter for Windows that converts XPS to PDF preserving the text content wherever possible.

Answer 1

If you can open the XPS document then a pdf printer should work quite well.

I have often used PDFCreator for this exact task. If there is text in a document that it is printing it maintains that as a text format rather than text->image->pdf which truely does suck.

It is free and you can convert to many more formats as well. Some versions of the installer want to install semi-junk toolbars so make sure to unselect them unless for some bizarre reasons you do want them.

Answer 2

GhostPDL, by the same developers as the better-known Ghostscript software, contains a module called "GhostXPS".

You can download GhostXPS here. You can use it under the GPL as well as under a commercial license. There are pre-compiled binaries for Windows as well as Linux available (plus a source code license in order to self-compile it on other platforms, like Mac OS X).

To convert an XPS file to a PDF, use this command:

gxps -o out.pdf        \
     -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
      input.xps