"Show formatting marks" toggle has an awful name. For two reasons: 1. Its name suggests that what is shows/hides *is* a formatting tool: paragraph marks, tabs, spaces... These *should not* be used for formatting! Such "formatting" (inherited from typewriter era) is evil in electronic documents that makes working with documents a nightmare. 2. Its name confuses people who think that turning on the marks, they would see the details of applied real formatting. A quote from IRC question: > hk239: hi > hk239: are there some 'hidden' formatting marks that are not displayed even > after you select 'show formatting marks'? > hk239: I'm wondering because the document behavior is inconsistent, although > I suspect it's not because of openoffice per ce, but because of the > underlying logic > hk239: for an example, sometimes when using the 'new line' or 'endline' > formatting mark, the next line begins immediately below the first one > hk239: and sometimes it leaves a space > hk239: At least there seems to be a distinction between a 'return' and a > 'newline' symbol, which can be made by pressing 'enter' or 'alt+enter' > but I think that's not the complete picture Something like "Show non-printing characters" would be much better (even though the option also shows text margins).
The change from "Non-printing Characters" (inherited from OOo) to "Formatting Marks" was done (for unclear reason, not described in the commit) in https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/37ad8daabf596e039b4ca62e06e91d5a83128b7c
But there are formatting marks--just not the old WP style codes. Exposing them currently requires both the <Ctrl>+F10 show NPC and <Ctrl>+F8 show Field Shading. IIRC the rename to 'Toggle Formatting Marks' and 'Formatting marks' arose while we were looking at legacy globbing of some NPC into the F8 field shading (.uno:ViewValueHighlighting) compared to <Ctrl>+F10 (.uno:ControlCodes) for showing Non-printing and META characters where they seemed to belong. bug 58434 remains open essentially to split out all but Field related controls from <Ctrl>+F8, and add them all to the <Ctrl>+F10 NPC toggle. Result would include the current NPC behavior, but also including more of the "formatting marks"--some shaded as Field data (e.g. NWNB (U+FEEF), ZWS (U+200B)--and some that have no indication on canvas RTL mark (U+200F), LTR (U+200E), Word join mark (U+2060). See attachment 112798 [details] attachment 112753 [details] from bug 58434 for additional descriptions.
Besides Stuart's arguments, I doubt the Benjamin users would stop using paragraph break to format the layout when it's renamed. So a lot of fuss for not much benefit.
I have no real objection to reverting the labeling to 'Non-printing Characters', but don't see much benefit either. Was commenting on why it was done when Jay was reworking menu/GUI items. My real hope is that suggestions of bug 58434 get picked up to make the .uno:ControlCodes command more meaningful.
No further opinion, so let's keep the status quo with "formatting marks".