Info Catalog elisp: Line Height elisp: Display elisp: Fringes

elisp: Faces

 
 37.12 Faces
 ===========
 
 A “face” is a collection of graphical attributes for displaying text:
 font, foreground color, background color, optional underlining, etc.
 Faces control how Emacs displays text in buffers, as well as other parts
 of the frame such as the mode line.
 
    One way to represent a face is as a property list of attributes, like
 ‘(:foreground "red" :weight bold)’.  Such a list is called an “anonymous
 face”.  For example, you can assign an anonymous face as the value of
 the ‘face’ text property, and Emacs will display the underlying text
 with the specified attributes.  Special Properties.
 
    More commonly, a face is referred to via a “face name”: a Lisp symbol
 associated with a set of face attributes(1).  Named faces are defined
 using the ‘defface’ macro (Defining Faces).  Emacs comes with
 several standard named faces (Basic Faces).
 
    Many parts of Emacs required named faces, and do not accept anonymous
DONTPRINTYET  faces.  These include the functions documented in Attribute
 Functions, and the variable ‘font-lock-keywords’ (*noteSearch-based
DONTPRINTYET  faces.  These include the functions documented in Attribute
 Functions, and the variable ‘font-lock-keywords’ (Search-based

 Fontification).  Unless otherwise stated, we will use the term “face”
 to refer only to named faces.
 
  -- Function: facep object
      This function returns a non-‘nil’ value if OBJECT is a named face:
      a Lisp symbol or string which serves as a face name.  Otherwise, it
      returns ‘nil’.
 

Menu

 
· Face Attributes     What is in a face?
· Defining Faces      How to define a face.
· Attribute Functions  Functions to examine and set face attributes.
· Displaying Faces     How Emacs combines the faces specified for a character.
· Face Remapping      Remapping faces to alternative definitions.
· Face Functions      How to define and examine faces.
· Auto Faces          Hook for automatic face assignment.
· Basic Faces         Faces that are defined by default.
· Font Selection      Finding the best available font for a face.
· Font Lookup         Looking up the names of available fonts
                           and information about them.
· Fontsets            A fontset is a collection of fonts
                           that handle a range of character sets.
· Low-Level Font      Lisp representation for character display fonts.
 
    ---------- Footnotes ----------
 
    (1) For backward compatibility, you can also use a string to specify
 a face name; that is equivalent to a Lisp symbol with the same name.
 

Info Catalog elisp: Line Height elisp: Display elisp: Fringes