there's an emacs function that can print the text with its text properties. Fixing this depends of course which package you are running. Sometimes the syntax table can intefere with font-lock regexp's so look at where comment is defined in the syntax-table of the major/minor mode.

what was the emacs regexp for excludeing a sequence of characters. Im trying to create a match to if if it has not goto statement in the same line "\\b\\(if\\)\\b.*^\\(igoto\\|kgoto\\)" this wont match to anything even tough igoto or kgoto are not present in the line.

ah the carrot is only exclude character in square brackets. Seems to be painful to get this effect, so nevermind.

Main problem: I'm using outline-minor-mode (can't use org mode). Comments aare headers. Comments are being displayed in comment-face instead of header-face. Question: how do I figure out in eamcs how the face is set? i.e. wehther it's set as code, keyword, comment, or header ?