Common solutions when troubleshooting PDF2XPS

In some cases, XPS viewers that support anti-aliased rendering produce line/space artifacts at neighboring picture elements (e.g. for image tiles or polygons sharing common edges). These artifacts are not a byproduct of PDF2XPS conversion, but are produced due to anti-aliased rendering in the XPS viewer. The same issue applies to the input PDF document however the current PDF viewers are typically better at handling this type of issues. The aliasing artifacts should not be visible during printing or high-resolution output.

Occasionally, there will be PDF elements that have no equivalent in XPS. In these cases PDF2XPS will by default render the necessary elements at 92 dpi or at the resolution given by the '---dpi' parameter. In other select cases, to generate the exact appearance of the original PDF document, an entire page may need to be rendered. In these cases rendering can be disabled using the '--norender' option. Disabling rendering will preserve resolution independent properties of input PDF documents (including fonts, paths, and shadings) as well as text selection and extraction capability in XPS processing software.

PDF format, unlike XPS, does not require mandatory font embedding. As a result PDF consumers, such as PDF2XPS and your favorite PDF viewer, need to find substitute fonts for missing fonts on the client system. Unfortunately, this means that there is no guarantee that file will render accurately on different systems or even in different PDF viewers. Default font substitution can be overridden using PDF SDK which offers additional options that are not available in the PDF2XPS Command-Line Utility. To avoid font substitution errors, simply make sure to create PDF documents with all fonts embedded.