libgxps 0.2.0

More than a month ago I released libgxps 0.1.0, the first release of libgxps, but for several reasons I ended up not announcing it. I’ve just released a new version that includes a small API break and a lot of new features and improvements, see the release notes for further details. I’ll release evince 3.3.2 next week depending on this new libgxps version (when building with –enable-xps).

XPS Documents

I’d never heard about XPS format until someone filed a bug report asking to support it in Evince. It doesn’t seem to be commonly used, at least in the free software community, since there are just a few requests in bugzilla. However, I downloaded and read the XPS specification (thanks to Okular) just out of curiosity, and it sounded like something fun to implement. Taking advantage of the quiet summer days I started to write a library based on GLib/GObject and Cairo to render XPS documents.

Today, the library implements the minimum stuff to be able to read the XPS spec (rendering, outline and links) and I’ve added a new backend to Evince that uses it. There are still some known bugs and many things to do, but it’s possible to read quite a lot of XPS documents with Evince already.

XPS Specification in Evince
XPS Specification in Evince