Re: Info tutorial is out of date

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   Nonetheless, some of the suggested changes that Drew made are good ones.
   The topic of invisible text is confusing

I do not see what is confusing about it.  It has been claimed that it
is not very useful.  But it really is, for people using Info from
within Emacs.  The fact that quite a bit of text appears apparently
out of nowhere when yanking, printing or writing to a file can be very
confusing to people (I still quite often get surprised by it and I can
only imagine how confusing it can be for less experienced users).  The
node explains to people why that happens and how they can see exactly
what they are going to yank, print or write to file by temporarily
making all text visible using visible-mode.  This is useful knowledge,
not just for Info, but for other Emacs buffers with invisible text as well.

`visible-mode' which is introduced in this node, is used later to help
users who want to learn how to use both the Emacs and standalone Info
readers see how the same text looks in the standalone reader (and
hence understand remarks about that reader) without actually having to
launch that reader and search for the same example text in that reader.

The note also explains how readers who prefer to have the info that
Emacs (but not the standalone reader) hides by default available in
Emacs as well, can achieve that by using `Info-hide-note-references'.

I believe that all of this is useful information and the node is not
even very long.

Note that the decision to add that material to the Info manual was
made after quite some discussion on Emacs devel, with your approval
and with Karl's support.

Sincerely,

Luc.