30.12.4 Faces in Formatted Text

The Faces submenu lists various Emacs faces including bold, italic, and underline. Selecting one of these adds the chosen face to the region. See Faces. You can also specify a face with these keyboard commands:

M-o d

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the default face (facemenu-set-default).

M-o b

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the bold face (facemenu-set-bold).

M-o i

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the italic face (facemenu-set-italic).

M-o l

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the bold-italic face (facemenu-set-bold-italic).

M-o u

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the underline face (facemenu-set-underline).

M-o o face <RET>

Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the face face (facemenu-set-face).

If you use these commands with a prefix argument—or, in Transient Mark mode, if the region is not active—then these commands specify a face to use for any immediately following self-inserting input. See Transient Mark. This applies to both the keyboard commands and the menu commands.

Specifying the default face also resets foreground and background color to their defaults.(see Format Colors).

Any self-inserting character you type inherits, by default, the face properties (as well as most other text properties) of the preceding character. Specifying any face property, including foreground or background color, for your next self-inserting character will prevent it from inheriting any face properties from the preceding character, although it will still inherit other text properties. Characters inserted by yanking do not inherit text properties.

Enriched mode defines two additional faces: excerpt and fixed. These correspond to codes used in the text/enriched file format.

The excerpt face is intended for quotations. This face is the same as italic unless you customize it (see Face Customization).

The fixed face means, “Use a fixed-width font for this part of the text.” Applying the fixed face to a part of the text will cause that part of the text to appear in a fixed-width font, even if the default font is variable-width. This applies to Emacs and to other systems that display text/enriched format. So if you specifically want a certain part of the text to use a fixed-width font, you should specify the fixed face for that part.

By default, the fixed face looks the same as bold. This is an attempt to distinguish it from default. You may wish to customize fixed to some other fixed-width medium font. See Face Customization.

If your terminal cannot display different faces, you will not be able to see them, but you can still edit documents containing faces, and even add faces and colors to documents. The faces you specify will be visible when the file is viewed on a terminal that can display them.