Reads an XPS or OpenXPS document and typesets its text as a PDF. Both formats are ZIPs of XAML that place every piece of text at a coordinate — structurally PDF’s twin — so this recovers the words and their structure rather than reproducing the page.
Why you cannot open your own file
Microsoft removed the XPS Viewer from Windows 10 in 2018. It can still be installed as an optional feature, but nothing else on any platform opens the format — not macOS, not a browser, not a phone. A file nobody can open is the problem this page exists for.
What is recoverable
Glyphs elements: a string, a font size and the exact coordinates to draw it at. There are no paragraphs in the file, exactly as there are none in a PDF.
Recovered: the text; paragraphs, reconstructed from where the lines sit relative to each other; headings, from text noticeably larger than the body; page order.
Not recovered: images, vector drawing, colours, fonts, tables and page furniture. Pages holding only pictures come out empty, and the result says how many.
OpenXPS is the same thing
.oxps is the standardised version of the format, produced by Windows 8 and later. The namespace differs; the page markup this reads does not, so both convert identically and the result says which one it found.Latin script only, and why
Writing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Devanagari or Cyrillic means embedding a font that contains those glyphs, and a font with usable CJK coverage is several megabytes. Downloading that on the chance a visitor needs it is not a reasonable trade for a page that mostly converts English.
So instead of producing a document full of blank boxes, unencodable characters become a question mark and the conversion tells you exactly how many were affected and which script they belonged to. If your text is in one of those scripts, this is the wrong tool and you should use a desktop converter — that is a more useful answer than a broken file.
Other names for this
Also searched as “oxps to pdf”, “convert xps”, “xps viewer alternative”, “open xps file”.
Questions
- Is my file uploaded?
- No. The PDF is built in this tab and handed to you as a download. That matters here more than most places: the documents people convert to PDF are contracts, CVs, medical letters and manuscripts.
- Will it look like the original?
- No. This recovers the text and its structure, not the layout — XPS records marks at coordinates, and reconstructing a page from those is a guess. If the layout matters and you have a Windows machine, installing the XPS Viewer and printing to PDF reproduces it exactly.
- My pages came out empty.
- They hold images or vector drawing rather than text. XPS stores a scanned page the same way a PDF does, and reading one needs OCR.
- Does it read .oxps?
- Yes. OpenXPS is the same format with a different namespace, and both are handled.
- Can I convert several files at once?
- Yes. Drop as many as you like, or a whole folder. Each becomes its own PDF keeping its original name.