Indeed, we use the word prototype in the way the reviewer suggests, i.e. Here’s a Word 2011 document showing invisible characters. The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewer 1 for her/his thorough.
Most of the requests I get on this topic concern turning invisibles off, because since the user often doesn’t know how he turned those invisible characters on, he also doesn’t know how to turn them off. Those characters are just as “charactery” as anything else you type– they take up space, they’re copy and paste-able, you can give them a point size– but they’re invisible, and they don’t print. Microsoft Word on the Mac has a nice feature that lets you show invisible (non-printing) characters such as returns, tabs, and spaces.
Command-8 to show them, Command-8 again to hide them. There’s a keyboard shortcut for toggling invisible characters (like paragraph marks, and spaces, and tabs) in Microsoft Word on a Mac and as far as I know it’s worked in every version, since the very beginning.
