Does the converter preserve hyperlinks?

XPS (XML Paper Specification) is Microsoft's answer to PDF, introduced with Windows Vista in 2006 and supported natively on Windows up through Windows 10's deprecation of the XPS Viewer in 2018. It is a ZIP archive of XML defining a fixed-layout page model, embedded fonts, and resources. Adoption outside Microsoft's ecosystem was minimal - PDF won - but .xps files persist in government and enterprise archives where Windows-only workflows produced fixed-layout documents through the print-to-XPS driver.

Today, .xps files arrive most often from European government agencies, UK NHS forms, and old corporate document management systems. macOS, Linux, and mobile devices have no native viewer. Adobe Acrobat does not open the format. heic.now parses the OOXML-adjacent structure, renders each fixed page at its declared dimensions, and encodes HEICs that match the original layout closely - embedded fonts decode correctly, vector graphics rasterise cleanly at 200 DPI, and the HEVC-compressed output runs about half the size of JPG pages, which matters when migrating a whole document-management system.

Common users include legal teams reviewing old discovery materials on iPads (where the HEIC pages open natively), IT migration projects extracting content from retiring Windows servers into compact image archives, and researchers reading old government documents that were mistakenly distributed as .xps. To produce a universally shareable bundle, pair the output with /heic-to-pdf - converting via rasterised pages is often more reliable than direct XPS-to-PDF tools, which sometimes mangle fonts. For OCR text recovery, route through /image-to-text.

Reasons to convert XPS to HEIC usually come down to compatibility, file-size, or specific feature requirements. Common situations:

• An app or platform only accepts HEIC uploads.
• You need a feature unique to HEIC (e.g. transparency, vector scaling, animation, multi-page pages, etc.) that XPS doesn't provide.
• You're optimising file size — modern formats often produce smaller files than the older format you started with.
• You need a single archival format across a project so files behave consistently in the same viewer.

1. Open the XPS → HEIC tool on heic.now.
2. Drag your XPS file onto the drop zone, or click Select files. You can drop a whole folder of files at once.
3. The output is fixed to HEIC. If the format supports extra options (page size, transparency background, quality, EXIF stripping), tweak them in the right-hand panel.
4. Click Convert. The job runs on our server and finishes in a few seconds for typical photos.
5. Download the result. Files stay in storage for 24 hours and are then permanently deleted.

The entire flow is free for the first 10 jobs per day with no signup required. A free account doubles that quota; a premium plan removes the limit entirely.

• OXPS is the OpenXPS variant standardised by Ecma; the converter handles both - just upload either extension.
• If fonts render as squares, the original embedded fonts that aren't on our server - re-export from Windows with all fonts embedded.
• For multi-page documents, expect one HEIC per page; bundle with /heic-to-pdf for sharing.
• Render at 300 DPI if the .xps contains scanned content or small footnote text.
• Signed XPS documents (digital signatures) render normally - the signature is not visible in the HEIC but the page content is.