Today, I had to print some receipts from web transactions done from a Windows 7 machine, and I didn't have a printer available. So, I used the built-in XPS printer, which prints to an XPS file. Well, I would have preferred to have a PDF converter, but I didn't want to install any more software on my disk-restricted Windows 7 partition. (Yes, because I work at Nuance, I can use PDF Converter Pro for free, but I really was running out of disk space.)
So, back to my Mac, I now have my XPS file. How do I convert that yet-another Microsoft proprietary file into PDF? Well, I found a way to do it from an obscure blog using a sub-project of the open-source Ghostscript called GhostPDL. Sadly, the binaries provided are only for Linux and Windows. No panic!
Remember my post from Saturday? Install Wineskin, create an empty wrapper, move both gxps and our XPS files in the wrapper's "C drive", use the advanced setting to start a DOS console, and run the command gxps on your file. That may not be very user-friendly, but it's all free (as in speech, GPL), and works on a Mac.
Published on August 28, 2012 at 20:23 EDT
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