Native formatting

Native QuarkXPress formatting can be used to set, modify, or remove, individual text and/or paragraph and/or textbox attributes, using the macro function FormatText. This means that formatting can be applied selectively and cumula5tively, depending on different conditions.

The disadvantage is that each and every option must be set individually, and determining the value to use can be challenging.

Xpress tags formatting

XPress tags formatting can be used to set the text and/or paragraph attributes of some selected text, or even an entire textbox. Additionally, it is possible to extract xpress tags formatting from some text in QuarkXPress, which makes it quite convenient (except for the advanced text formatting introduced with QuarkXPress 2017, which cannot be applied using XPress tags).

The disadvantage of this type of formatting is that the formatting is applied en masse, there is not the fine granularity of the native formatting. Also, the format of xpress tags tends to change from one version of QuarkXPress to another, so it is always important to specify the version of QuarkXPress to which a specific set of xpress tags formatting relates to.