Select a sample page. Right click and choose Extract Pages and follow the prompts. Name the files appropriately so you can better judge the results of your experiments. You may want to choose three different pages text only, line drawing or graphics heavy, and photographic image heavy to experiment around with. This process generates some really large transitional files. Your final files are likely to be somewhat larger than the original file, depending on the original document and which OCR output style you choose. However, they will also be a lot more useful. Full Procedure Install the XPS printer driver if you dont already have it on your computer XPS is Microsofts answer to the Adobe Acrobat file format. It stands for XML Paper Specification, following Microsofts habit of using generic naming for their products, as if they were the only product of their type in existence. From what I have read, it is supposedly similar to Acrobat except that everything is in XML and can therefore be read by humans. It also makes for some extraneously large files. Fortunately we dont have to leave our files in this format. It is merely used as a transitional format, the conversion to which, strips out the bothersome renderable text. Download the XPS printer driver here http www. Family. IDb. 8dcffdd e. Save the file where you can find it then double click it to start the install. Follow the prompts to complete the install. This will create a new printer in your Printers and Faxes folder. To print to it, you simply choose that printer instead of your regular printer when you print a document. Print the. PDF file to the. XPS printer. Open the file in question using the latest version of Acrobat Reader and follow these GCGUINS instructions File Print Printer, Name Mocrpsoft XPS Document Writerv Properties lt Layout Advanced Microsoft XPS. Document Options Interleaving Off. Images PNG Lossless compressionv OK OK Page Handling, Page Scaling Nonev Auto Rotate. OK to print it to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer driver just as you would when printing to an Acrobat. PDF file. The printer driver will open up a File Save dialog asking where to save the. XPS file. This could take quite some time depending on how much rendered text i. Text that is actually only an image should convert rather quickly because this process seems to simply move the image portions of the documents straight over without any conversion or alteration whatsoever. Though I am not positive, the little bit of poking around in the document I did, causes me to speculate that the. XPS printer driver converts each and every character in the document into a vector graphic, similar to an Adobe postscript file. As you can imagine, this makes for an incredibly large file see the table below and it takes a really long time. I would suggest you start this process and then go off to a long lunch or meeting. If you have a separate computer on which you can run these processes, mores the better. Convert the. XPS file back into a. PDF file. Now this step is really going to take a long time, perhaps hours. If you have a large document with lots of rendered text, I recommend that you start the process before going to bed or before leaving the office for the night. In addition, once you have started this process, it will look as if your computer isnt doing anything at all for almost the entire time. This is because Acrobat does not display any user interface until it has completed the conversion and has a. PDF document to show. Right click on the file and choose the appropriate context menu option. Some installations of Acrobat place an item in the Windows file explorer context menu pops up when you right click on a file that says Combine supported files in Acrobat. Acrobat knows how to convert to. PDF format. If you see this option in your context menu when you right click on a. XPS file then choose it because this gives you the most control. Yes, it works even though you only selected one file. In the Combine Files dialog, in the lower right corner Choose the largest document icon to choose the largest file size, and click Combine Files. If the above option is not available look for Convert to Adobe PDF. This function will not open any dialog or the Acrobat Pro window until the file has been completely converted. It will look as if your computer is either not doing anything or is locked up. Dont reboot like I did the first few times interrupting the process. Just be patient. If you dont see either of the above options then from the context menu choose Open With Adobe Acrobat x or choose Open With Choose Program. Adobe Acrobat from the list. Be sure not to select Acrobat Reader. I wouldnt recommend selecting the Always use the selected program to open this kind of file option because you only want to open. XPS files in Acrobat when you really want to convert them to. PDF format. If you just want to view the file quickly, you really should just use the XPS viewer. It is a lot faster. Optional If you had to use either of the last two options above then you may want to double check that things have actually started processing. As I stated earlier, Acrobat may not display anything for hours. The best way to check on this is to use the Windows Task Manager. Right click in the task bar and choose Task Manager XP or Start Task Manager Windows 7. Select the Processes tab and look for acrobat. If you click the CPU column header twice not double click then acrobat. The acrobat. exe process should be using about 5.