[danmg]

Word's "Reveal Formatting" just shows tabs, spaces, and carriage returns as distinct symbols iirc.

Wordperfect's "Show Codes" tells you every attribute and layout change inline.

For example, if bolded some text, Word would just bold it. Wordperfect would insert a symbol like [bold] and the text would be plain, instead of rendering it. Removing the code symbol would change the attribute from the text. This allowed you do to format documents for printing on a system that couldn't handle displaying them fully formatted interactively.