RE: Todays exercise of sanity (or does "see" really match "not"?)

[Drew Adams]

    I guess that you have Info-hide-note-references enabled.  The reason
    why it stops on "see" is that the actual text in the buffer is:
    (*note Character Sets::). and note matches "not".

I filed a bug report on this behavior on Oct 4. Juri fixed it on Oct 31 with
respect to stuff in the header (File, Next etc.), but there was no fix AFAIK
for Note and Menu.

In discussion of the bug report, I stated that "we should be able somehow to
separate _content_ in a manual from _structural and navigational artifacts_
that support that content."

I still think that should be the goal: users should use TAB to go to the
next cross reference, instead of searching for "Note". The text "Note" for a
cross reference is not content; it is metacontent. If a user searches for
"Note", he should find only occurrences of the actual text "Note" in the
manual, not cross references.

In practice, however, it might not be that easy to distinguish content from
meta-information in the case of meta-info that is not in the header. At
least that's what I understood from the discussion at the time.

Here is part of Juri's explanation from that discussion:

    `Info-search' searches for a string on raw text of Info files.
    Some parts of Info files where Info nodes were already visited are
    fontified and have `invisible' property.  But fontifying and adding
    `invisible' or other properties to hide the tags from search
    to the whole Info file before search is too inefficient, so
    `Info-search' can't rely on text properties.  Instead of that,
    it should rely on the known syntax of Info files such as that Info nodes
    begin with a ^_ character.  I think skipping the header is sufficient
    to ignore irrelevant parts of Info nodes, and I see no problem with
    other special Info tags like Note and Menu.

In reply to David's point about preview-latex needing to search and find the
meta-text: I agree that programs need to be able to find meta-text. The
point is to separate such meta-text from the content - or at least be _able_
to separate/distinguish it. In most modes, at least, Info-search should not
find strings that are in meta-text (if this is not to difficult to fix).