I want to convert my xps file into a docx file

Your best bet is to do a copy and paste into a new Word document.

Here's some detailed info from MSDN forum:

The problem is that XPS is fixed layout - which is only a hairs-breadth away from being apicture of the document - similar to a scanned fax copy of the document.  And in fact, if you read up on how XPS represents the document, each page is essentially just that: a picture.  Of course it's a picture thatmight be drawn using some high-level routines provided by XAML and WPF, but it's still just a picture.

Word's DOCX format on the other hand is an editable format - which includes conceptual layout ideas such as: margins, paragraphs, line-wrapping, repeating headers and footers, etc.

The primary means to produce an XPS document today is to manually use the XPS printer driver from Microsoft.  Of course there are more and more places out there writing direct-to-XPS tools, but none of those are really mainstream yet.

And since most of the document sources that are printing into XPS are pre-Vista, they will be using the old Windows printing API todraw each page content using the old Windows GDI graphics commands.  And for some software (Adobe Reader specifically) for which the Windows GDI is insufficient, they do their own rendering of each page down to abitmap - and then send that bitmap to the GDI printer.  The XPS can only contain the information that was sent to it via the printer driver:  All graphics drawing commands.

As a result, an XPS "document" contains no knowledge of those layout concepts mentioned above - and does not even have a means by which they can be specified.

You can convert an XPS document to DOCX  ( see here and here ) but the DOCX will contain only the same information that was contained in the XPS - which means that there are no margins, no paragraphs, no headers, no footers, and possibly no text.  If the XPS was produced with each page as a bitmap (such as when printed by Adobe Reader) - then each page of the DOCX will simply contain one page-sized image.

Even if the XPS was created to contain text, each word of the text will probably be positioned independent of the remaining text.   The best this could be represented in Word would be to have each text word (or possibly line of text) placed in a separate Text Box with a fixed location on the page.


And since you can already view or print XPS, the only reason to convert to DOCX is for editing.  This is why nobody bothers.

Alternatively, if all you want is the document content and could care less about the layout, you could write a conversion tool that simply extracted the text (if present) and created a simple TXT file that could be loaded into Word.  Of course, since you've lost all the layout information, it probably won't be useful without a lot of manual editing and layout work.

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