[pdftex] Announcing: XPSTeX

[Martin Schröder]

Over the past months Thanh and I have been in secret negotiations with
Microsoft, which have now come to an agreement that allow me to
announce the start of a new project:

                           XPSTeX

XPSTeX will be a TeX-compatible program producing XPS-files out of
TeX. DVI-output may be possible in future releases. PDF is not
planned.

The initial implementation will be done in C# for .NET; future
versions will be integrated with Microsoft Office as a backend for
Word (for this, we have support by Leslie Lamport through Microsoft
Research).

For scripting (like in luaTeX) we will use VBScript, but the .NET
integration will give users access to such wonderfull languages as
COBOL, FORTRAN, Haskell, Lisp, and Smalltalk -- all in one document.
And to make Hans happy, Ruby is also available.


About XPS: The XML Paper Specification (XPS), formerly codenamed
"Metro", is a document storage and viewing specification developed by
Microsoft. The specification itself describes the formats and rules
for distributing, archiving, rendering, and processing XPS documents.
Most notably, the markup language for XPS is a subset of XAML for
Windows Presentation Foundation, so that the methods used for
rendering Windows applications can be used for documents.

Best
   Martin


PS: I will not do any further work on pdfTeX but have appointed Axel
Sommerfeldt (of caption fame) as the new maintainer.
PPS: Ncevy sbbyf!