27.10.4 Face Resources

The attributes of faces are also per-frame. They can be specified as:

Emacs.FACE_NAME.parameter: value

or

Emacs*FRAME_NAME.FACE_NAME.parameter: value

Faces accept the following resources:

attributeFont (class AttributeFont): font-name

The font of this face.

attributeForeground (class AttributeForeground): color-name

attributeBackground (class AttributeBackground): color-name

The foreground and background colors of this face.

attributeBackgroundPixmap (class AttributeBackgroundPixmap): file-name

The name of an XBM file (or XPM file, if your version of Emacs supports XPM), to use as a background stipple.

attributeUnderline (class AttributeUnderline): boolean

Whether text in this face should be underlined.

All text is displayed in some face, defaulting to the face named default. To set the font of normal text, use Emacs*default.attributeFont. To set it in the frame named fred, use Emacs*fred.default.attributeFont.

These are the names of the predefined faces:

default

Everything inherits from this.

bold

If this is not specified in the resource database, Emacs tries to find a bold version of the font of the default face.

italic

If this is not specified in the resource database, Emacs tries to find an italic version of the font of the default face.

bold-italic

If this is not specified in the resource database, Emacs tries to find a bold-italic version of the font of the default face.

modeline

This is the face that the modeline is displayed in. If not specified in the resource database, it is determined from the default face by reversing the foreground and background colors.

highlight

This is the face that highlighted extents (for example, Info cross-references and possible completions, when the mouse passes over them) are displayed in.

left-margin

right-margin

These are the faces that the left and right annotation margins are displayed in.

zmacs-region

This is the face that mouse selections are displayed in.

isearch

This is the face that the matched text being searched for is displayed in.

info-node

This is the face of info menu items. If unspecified, it is copied from bold-italic.

info-xref

This is the face of info cross-references. If unspecified, it is copied from bold. (Note that, when the mouse passes over a cross-reference, the cross-reference’s face is determined from a combination of the info-xref and highlight faces.)

Other packages might define their own faces; to see a list of all faces, use any of the interactive face-manipulation commands such as set-face-font and type ‘?’ when you are prompted for the name of a face.

If the bold, italic, and bold-italic faces are not specified in the resource database, then SXEmacs attempts to derive them from the font of the default face. It can only succeed at this if you have specified the default font using the XLFD (X Logical Font Description) format, which looks like

*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*

If you use any of the other, less strict font name formats, some of which look like

lucidasanstypewriter-12
fixed
9x13

then SXEmacs won’t be able to guess the names of the bold and italic versions. All X fonts can be referred to via XLFD-style names, so you should use those forms. See the man pages for ‘X(1)’, ‘xlsfonts(1)’, and ‘xfontsel(1)’.