Let $G$ be a strongly connected digraph with vertex set $\{v_1, v_2, \dots, v_n\}$. Denote by $D_{ij}$ the distance between vertices $v_i$ and $v_j$ in $G$. Two variant versions of matrix were proposed Yan Yeh (Adv. Appl. Math.), Bapat et al. (Linear Algebra Appl.) independently, one is $q$-distance matrix, other exponential matrix. Given nonzero indeterminate $q$, $\mathscr{D}_G=(\mathscr{D}_{...