Today at WinHec 2005 Keynote, Microsoft announce a new printing technology that will be part of Longhorn, it is codenamed: METRO.

"Metro offers a unified framework to address the growing use of electronic document-based workflows, and inclusion of advanced graphics and extended color information in everyday documents and Web applications. “Metro” offers an open document format that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML), a public standard for exchanging data between disparate systems, and other current, industry standards to create a modern, cross-platform document and imaging technologies. “Metro” simplifies creation, sharing, printing, viewing and archiving of digital documents, while also improving image fidelity and print performance." Hmmm so could this be a Acrobat/PDF killer? What do you think? read on...
“Metro” provides an authoring and information exchange platform to support the new document format. The complete family of technologies includes the following: 
  
A complete specification for a fixed-layout document format based on XML that offers “electronic paper” for use by any application on any platform.
 
A “viewer” to view, manage and print files 

A print-to-file converter for creating the files from any Microsoft® Windows-based application 

A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to incorporate “Metro” technologies and documents with traditional applications, the Web and computer hardware 

A print pipeline with an integrated spool format and printer-page description language to speed up and improve the fidelity of print jobs 

An updated driver model for “Metro”-consuming printers 

Timeline
Microsoft expects to complete the “Metro” specification during the “Longhorn” development cycle. Following the introduction of the specification at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2005 in April, “Metro” is planned to be delivered as part of Windows “Longhorn” and WinFX in the second half of 2006. The “Metro” specification is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/metro.mspxFull Story At Source

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