I'm wondering if a lawyer's use of Google Docs or other web-based document storage app would be considered a breach of client privacy or violation of some confidentiality laws?
Yes, I know that lawyers (and doctors, etc.) use email, but email is at least 30 years older than could-based apps like Google Docs, so more allowance has been made for it. In other words, a lawyer might fear getting into trouble for using web-based storage, but won't fear sending the same thing by email.
Yes, I also know that proper use of cryptography can solve all of these issues, but we all know that virtually no lawyer (or doctor or similar professional) ever uses encryption.
I never much cared for it myself but a former employers sold quite a bit of it (on minicomputers) to law forms.
Reveal codes is essentially your browser's view source command, but with interactive editing (i.e., with live update of the WYSIWYG output). I never heard of it being used to check for hidden text, though I suppose that's possible. It is used to address formatting issues -- those annoying situations where the word processor is doing something unexpected, or if you want to know if the empty space is a set of spaces or a tab.
Its funny, I can think of very few obvious advances in word processors since the mid-90s, but loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS, which is probably the first piece of software I ever used.
All versions of WordPerfect for Windows had and have Reveal codes. Word on the other hand ...
I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product.
And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software.
A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten.
Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes
Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers
"A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)
ITYM "ditched non-Latex word processors"? It's not as though Latex creators don't use software that in many ways resembles conventional word processors.