The next incarnation of the .Net framework, shipping with Windows Vista, will include a new format for printing documents called XPS, or Xml Paper Specification. This will be part of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
It seems that Microsoft is determined to make printing on Vista take as long---and as much memory---as possible.
I downloaded the release candidate of the .Net Framework 3.0, and "XPS Writer" which is a printer driver that works with Windows XP to create XPS documents. Printing a 17-page document took 2 minutes on my 3 GHz machine with 2 GB of memory. And this is printing to a file, mind you. How big do you think the file was? The Postscript version of the same file was 300 kB (and took less than a second to spool).
The XPS version was 12 MB. I am not kidding. If you opened this file in a text editor and printed it, the result would be over 3000 pages long.
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