T.11.4 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 section J.1 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 H.2 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 AD.2.2.3 Customizing Faces).

The fixed face means, "Use a fixed-width font for this part of the text." This makes a visible difference only if you have specified a variable-width font in the default face; however, even if the default font is fixed-width, applying the fixed face to a part of the text will cause that part of the text to appear in a fixed-width font, if the file is ever displayed with a variable-width default font. 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.

The fixed face is normally set up to use a different font from the default, even if the default face is also fixed-width. Different systems have different fonts installed, so you may need to customize this. See section AD.2.2.3 Customizing Faces.

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.