30.12.4 Faces in Formatted Text

The Faces submenu lists various Emacs faces including bold, italic, and underline (see Faces). These menu items operate on the region if it is active and nonempty. Otherwise, they specify to use that face for an immediately following self-inserting character. Instead of the menu, you can use these keyboard commands:

M-o d

Remove all face properties from the region (which includes specified colors), or force the following inserted character to have no face property (facemenu-set-default).

M-o b

Add the face bold to the region or to the following inserted character (facemenu-set-bold).

M-o i

Add the face italic to the region or to the following inserted character (facemenu-set-italic).

M-o l

Add the face bold-italic to the region or to the following inserted character (facemenu-set-bold-italic).

M-o u

Add the face underline to the region or to the following inserted character (facemenu-set-underline).

M-o o face <RET>

Add the face face to the region or to the following inserted character (facemenu-set-face).

With a prefix argument, all these commands apply to an immediately following self-inserting character, disregarding the region.

A self-inserting character normally inherits the face property (and most other text properties) from the preceding character in the buffer. If you use the above commands to specify face for the next self-inserting character, or the next section's commands to specify a foreground or background color for it, then it does not inherit the face property from the preceding character; instead it uses whatever you specified. It will still inherit other text properties, though.

Strictly speaking, these commands apply only to the first following self-inserting character that you type. But if you insert additional characters after it, they will inherit from the first one. So it appears that these commands apply to all of them.

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.