I've used XPress for about 13 years. I have always found their lack of innovation frustrating. Their customer service is frustrating. Their over inflated upgrade costs for bug-ridden half baked releases is frustrating. The ONLY reason XPress is "so good" (and I use that term loosely) is because of all of the 3rd party extensions that have helped fill in the holes that have existed for years. Why in the heck did we have to wait for XPress 5 for LAYERS for heavensake? MULTIPLE UNDOs - FINALLY! This stuff should have been in years ago!! Great gravy I think Quark must think it's 1992. - HELLO?
The price that Quark wants for a program that does not come even remotely close to InDesign is laughable. On top of their price you STILL need extensions!! Quarks "latest" is still lightyears behind.
As far as I'm concerned XPress is a good output program. It's pretty fast, it's a lightweight so you can run it on dusty old Macs if you want to. It doesn't gobble much RAM. So if you still want to use your Mac IIcx, and 44mb syquest drive then XPress is the program for you. That's about the only nice things that I can think of to say about the program.
Now if you want a program that is a joy to use from a creative standpoint, that sets great type, that has a feature rich, modern toolset, then you need InDesign. Yes it may be a tad slower that XPress, but it that's to be expected it's doing soooo much more.
InDesign is still a young program and admittedly it has a few pimples. XPress on the other hand, has been around forever and has plenty of pimples, boils and scabs!
Ranting aside, I HOPE XPress 6 is decent. We still see XPress files everyday, so like it or not, I am going to have to use it. All new work that we do however is being done in InDesign.
Quark may get some of my employer's cash, but they won't get mine. I retired my personal copy of XPress at version 4 and instead have 2 copies of InDesign.
B