Next: Standard Faces, Up: Display
You can specify various styles for displaying text using faces. Each face can specify various face attributes, such as the font family, the height, weight and slant of the characters, the foreground and background color, and underlining or overlining. A face does not have to specify all of these attributes; often it inherits most of them from another face.
On a window system, all the Emacs face attributes are meaningful. On a character terminal, only some of them work. Some character terminals support inverse video, bold, and underline attributes; some support colors. Character terminals generally do not support changing the height and width or the font family.
The easiest way to use faces is to turn on Font Lock mode.
See Font Lock, for more information about Font Lock mode and
syntactic highlighting. You can print out the buffer with the
highlighting that appears on your screen using the command
ps-print-buffer-with-faces
. See PostScript.
Features which rely on text in multiple faces (such as Font Lock mode)
will also work on non-windowed terminals that can display more than one
face, whether by colors or underlining and emboldening. This includes
the console on GNU/Linux, an xterm
which supports colors, the
MS-DOS display (see MS-DOS), and the MS-Windows version invoked with
the -nw option. Emacs determines automatically whether the
terminal has this capability.
You control the appearance of a part of the text in the buffer by
specifying the face or faces to use for it. The style of display used
for any given character is determined by combining the attributes of
all the applicable faces specified for that character. Any attribute
that isn't specified by these faces is taken from the default
face,
whose attributes reflect the default settings of the frame itself.
Enriched mode, the mode for editing formatted text, includes several commands and menus for specifying faces for text in the buffer. See Format Faces, for how to specify the font for text in the buffer. See Format Colors, for how to specify the foreground and background color.
To alter the appearance of a face, use the customization buffer.
See Face Customization. You can also use X resources to specify
attributes of particular faces (see Resources). Alternatively,
you can change the foreground and background colors of a specific face
with M-x set-face-foreground and M-x set-face-background.
These commands prompt in the minibuffer for a face name and a color
name, with completion, and then set that face to use the specified
color. Changing the colors of the default
face also changes
the foreground and background colors on all frames, both existing and
those to be created in the future. (You can also set foreground and
background colors for the current frame only; see Frame Parameters.)
Emacs can correctly display variable-width fonts, but Emacs commands that calculate width and indentation do not know how to calculate variable widths. This can sometimes lead to incorrect results when you use variable-width fonts. In particular, indentation commands can give inconsistent results, so we recommend you avoid variable-width fonts for editing program source code. Filling will sometimes make lines too long or too short. We plan to address these issues in future Emacs versions.