Nonprinting characters or formatting marks are characters for content designing in word processors, which are not displayed at printing. It is also possible to customize their display on the monitor. The most common nonprintable characters in word processors are pilcrow, space, nonbreaking space, tab character etc.^[1][2]

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To display characters on the monitor screen in Microsoft Word (Home tab) or OpenOffice.org and its derivatives (upper panel), press the icon ¶.^[3] The following symbols will be displayed:^{[citation needed]}

• Space (·) each pressing of the space key will be displayed like this.
• Nonbreaking space (°) is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position.
• Pilcrow (¶) is the symbolic representation of paragraphs.
• Line break (↵) breaks the current line without new paragraph. It puts lines of text close together.
• Tab character (→) is used to align text horizontally to the next tab stop.
• End-of-cell and end-of row markers (¤) appear automatically in each box when display of nonprintable characters turned on.
• Soft hyphen or nonbreaking hyphen (-) is a hidden separator for hyphenation in the places specified by the user, regardless of the automatic hyphenation.^[4]
• ············Page Break············, ::::::::::Section Break:::::::::: or ············Column Break············

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• Control characters