XPS File Shows Blank Pages: Why It Happens and How to Fix It

If your XPS file opens without errors but the pages appear blank, white, or stripped of content, the file itself is usually intact — the problem is in how it is being rendered. Font-embedding issues, viewer bugs, and unusual page geometry are the most frequent causes. In rarer cases the file was created empty or with white content on a white background.

The checks below take a few minutes and cover the most common scenarios in order of likelihood.

Check: is this a viewer rendering problem?

The fastest diagnostic is to convert the file to PDF and open the result. The converter uses a different rendering engine from the XPS Viewer, so a viewer glitch will often disappear in the PDF output. If the PDF pages contain the expected content, the XPS file is fine — the problem was specific to your viewer.

If the PDF is also blank, the issue is inside the file itself (content genuinely absent, font problem, or geometry issue) rather than a viewer quirk — continue to the sections below.

Font and resource embedding issues

XPS is designed to embed all fonts and resources so the document renders identically everywhere. However, some tools produce XPS with broken or absent font references. When the renderer cannot find the font data, it may render nothing at all rather than falling back to a substitute font — the result is a blank page with invisible text.

How to confirm this is the cause:

• Open the XPS Viewer and try selecting text on a blank page. If your cursor changes to a text cursor and you can highlight an area, the text is present but invisible — a font or colour rendering issue.
• Try zooming in to 400%. Sometimes text rendered in white on white, or at a very small point size due to a scaling error, becomes visible at high zoom.

If text is there but invisible, the fix is to convert to PDF: the conversion re-renders each page as a graphic, which resolves most font colour and visibility problems. The PDF output from this converter is a re-render, not a simple container swap, so it handles these cases well.

XPS Viewer rendering bugs on Windows 11

The XPS Viewer, which became an optional feature from Windows 10 v1709 onwards and is absent from Windows 11 by default, has known rendering issues with certain XPS documents on newer versions of Windows. These manifest as blank pages, missing graphics, or incorrect page backgrounds.

If the Viewer installed from Windows 11 Optional Features is producing blank pages:

• Convert the file to PDF using this converter and open the result in Microsoft Edge. Edge's PDF renderer is more current than the XPS Viewer and will typically display the content correctly.
• If the PDF also shows blank pages, the problem is in the file, not the viewer.

Converting to JPG is another option: the converter renders each page to a 300 DPI image, which bypasses all font and text-rendering paths entirely and will show exactly what a correctly working renderer would produce.

The file was genuinely created blank or empty

It is worth checking whether the XPS was created with content in the first place. This sounds unlikely, but it happens in a few specific situations:

• Print to XPS from a blank document. If someone printed an empty or nearly-empty document to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer, the resulting XPS will have the correct page count but no visible content.
• White text on a white background. A Word or Excel document formatted with white text — perhaps to hide content visually — will produce a blank-looking XPS. Open the source document, select all, and change the font colour to automatic/black before re-exporting.
• An image-only document where the images failed to embed. Some scan-to-XPS workflows produce an XPS where the page images are referenced as external files rather than embedded. If those external files are not present, every page will be blank.

If the PDF output is also blank

A blank PDF output confirms the source XPS contains no renderable content on those pages. At this point, the XPS is not recoverable from the file alone — you need to go back to the source. Re-open the original document (Word, Excel, a scanner application) and re-export or re-scan. If you no longer have the original, ask the person who sent the XPS to re-send it, or to export as PDF directly from their end.

If only some pages are blank and others render, the most likely cause is a partially corrupted file — see the corrupted XPS guide for recovery options.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my XPS file open but show only white pages?

The most common reasons are: a font embedding failure in the source document (text is present but invisible), a rendering bug in the XPS Viewer on Windows 11, or the document was genuinely created with no visible content. Convert it to PDF first — if the PDF has content, the issue was in the viewer.

Can I check whether text is present on a blank XPS page?

Yes. In the XPS Viewer, try clicking and dragging to select text on a blank page. If the cursor becomes a text cursor and an area highlights, text is present but not visible — a font colour or rendering problem. Converting to PDF resolves most cases like this.

The XPS shows blank pages in the viewer but the PDF has all the content — is the XPS file damaged?

No, not necessarily. A different rendering result between the XPS Viewer and the PDF converter points to a viewer bug or a font-handling edge case, not damage to the file. The PDF is the reliable output — use that.

My XPS has 10 pages but only pages 3–7 are blank — what is causing that?

Selective blank pages within a document usually indicate a corrupted or missing resource (image, font subset) for those specific pages in the XPS ZIP container. Try converting regardless — the converter may render them correctly. If they are blank in the PDF too, re-export from the source is the only fix.

Would converting to JPG instead of PDF show blank images or actual content?

JPG conversion renders each page as a pixel image at 300 DPI, bypassing font substitution and text-rendering paths entirely. If the content is present in the XPS but invisible due to a font issue, the JPG output will usually show it correctly.

I think the original Word document had white text — how do I check before re-exporting?

Open the Word document, press Ctrl+A to select all, then in the Font Colour dropdown check for white or near-white colours. Change all text to Automatic or Black before exporting to XPS or PDF again.

Last updated: June 2026