Is there an InDesign to XPS workflow other than printing to an XPS “printer”?

Question

The book I'm designing was requested originally in PDF format, and that's how it's set up in InDesign. So far, so good, and it's about 90% complete at this point. We've already jumped through a fair number of design hoops on the project, since the first two volumes of the series, done last year, were printed, and the design elements were all set up with print in mind.

The client just called, and his "guy" (who will be setting up the book, various videos and other materials for distribution on USB drives) has said he needs the book in XPS format.

Before I go all out to dissuade the client I just want to be sure that there isn't, in fact, a simple way to get from InDesign to XPS and retain all of the interactive components (bookmarks, internal hyperlinks/buttons, etc.) in the document. I'm almost entirely unfamiliar with XPS, other than to know it exists and to convert any XPS documents I receive to PDF.

Then burning question, then is: is there a way to get from where the project is now, a highly styled InDesign book, to XPS format without

• losing the interactive capabilities?

• spending an inordinate amount of time and money to get there?

Answer 1

It turns out after much research that the short answer is "No." There is no facility to go from InDesign directly to XPS other than using the built-in Windows XPS printer driver (it's called the "Microsoft XPS Document Writer"). Any interactive elements are gone, of course, but since XPS is essentially XML-in-a-zip (much in the way that ePub is HTML-in-a-zip-file) it is fairly simple to at least access the components programatically.

Later Edit: HOWEVER, I did track down PDF2XPS, a command-line utility that converts PDFs to XPS at breakneck speed, preserving bookmarks, hyperlinks, etc., in the PDF. It's not cheap, but it does the job admirably and doesn't have the restrictions of the built-in XPS Document driver.