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38.12 Faces

A face is a collection of graphical attributes for displaying text: font family, foreground color, background color, optional underlining, and so on. Faces control how buffer text is displayed, and how some parts of the frame, such as the mode-line, are displayed. See Standard Faces, for the list of faces Emacs normally comes with.

For most purposes, you refer to a face in Lisp programs using its face name. This is either a string or (equivalently) a Lisp symbol whose name is equal to that string.

— Function: facep object

This function returns a non-nil value if object is a Lisp symbol or string that names a face. Otherwise, it returns nil.

Each face name is meaningful for all frames, and by default it has the same meaning in all frames. But you can arrange to give a particular face name a special meaning in one frame if you wish.