XPS Annotator - Free download and software reviews

PDF Annotator 3.0.0.330 allows users to open any PDF file and add annotations, using the mouse or a Tablet PC pen, directly manipulated on the PDF document page. The annotated documents can be saved directly on the PDF format. This way, anyone can read or print the annotated PDF documents. Annotated documents can also be easily attached to emails.

Key Features:

- Add notes and annotations to any PDF document - comments, the repair, the signature, applying light, even designs and drawings. 
- Save annotations in the original file you. Share them with coworkers, email them to partners or back to the author that they had no special software needed to view the document. 
- Type comments on top of PDF content, paste on photographs, use a pen or a touch panel for drawing, if you have them. 
- Restore to the original document at any time. Remove or hide all markup with just one mouse click. 
- Insert blank pages for more space. Or put comments at any place on the pages.

XPS files, where XPS stands for XML Paper Specification, define the layout, printing specifications, and other factors about a document. They're similar to PDFs, but are based on XML. Windows has a built-in XPS Viewer that opens automatically when you click an XPS file, but it's pretty basic. XPS Annotator is a free, full-featured, standalone XPS file viewer, document annotator, XPS-to-image converter, properties adder and editor, and digital document signing tool. It has familiar operations such as zoom, search, save, copy, and print to a variety of output options. It supports hyperlinks, too.

XPS Annotator is a compact program that has several installation options, including a totally portable installation, but we chose to run the Windows-style setup wizard. The program's interface is very clean and simple, with a blank document window and simple file menus and control icons for printing, copying, and zooming in and out on documents, as well as set page layouts. We navigated to an XPS file and selected it. A thumbnail preview of the file appeared in the right half of the Open File dialog, a useful touch. We opened the file in XPS Annotator, which displayed it in the main view. We clicked Signatures, and a properties dialog for signing documents opened. We entered our data in the appropriate fields, clicked Sign, and then clicked Done. We then reopened Signatures and edited the one we'd created, changing several entries, and saved it. Next we clicked Properties, and a Properties Dialog template opened with blank fields. We entered our document data and clicked OK. We closed the document, returned to the desktop, and opened the document in the built-in Windows XPS Viewer, which correctly identified the new digital signature. We clicked Properties, and the properties dialog we'd just created appeared. We also tried the Permissions and Request Signatures functions, which worked as advertised.

This free tool does much more than the native Windows utility, but it's just as easy to use. XPS Annotator is recommended to anyone who handles XPS documents.