GNU Emacs Manual - Format Faces

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### 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 section Using Multiple Typefaces. You can also specify a face with these keyboard commands:

`M-g d`
  Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the `default` face (`facemenu-set-default`).
`M-g b`
  Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the `bold` face (`facemenu-set-bold`).
`M-g i`
  Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the `italic` face (`facemenu-set-italic`).
`M-g l`
  Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the `bold-italic` face (`facemenu-set-bold-italic`).
`M-g u`
  Set the region, or the next inserted character, to the `underline` face (`facemenu-set-underline`).
`M-g 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 your next self-inserting input. See section Transient Mark Mode. This applies to both the keyboard commands and the menu commands.

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 section Customizing Faces).

The `fixed` face is meant to say, "Use a fixed-width font for this part of the text." Emacs currently supports only fixed-width fonts; therefore, the `fixed` annotation is not necessary now. However, we plan to support variable width fonts in future Emacs versions, and other systems that display text/enriched format may not use a fixed-width font as the default. 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.

The `fixed` face is normally defined to use a different font from the default. However, different systems have different fonts installed, so you may need to customize this.

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

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