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Declaring Faces

Faces are declared with defface.

Function: defface face spec doc [keyword value]...
Declare face as a customizable face that defaults according to spec. Do not quote the symbol face.

doc is the face documentation.

spec should be an alist whose elements have the form (display atts) (see below). When defface executes, it defines the face according to spec, then uses any customizations saved in the `.emacs' file to override that specification.

In each element of spec, atts is a list of face attributes and their values. The possible attributes are defined in the variable custom-face-attributes.

The display part of an element of spec determines which frames the element applies to. If more than one element of spec matches a given frame, the first matching element is the only one used for that frame.

If display is t in a spec element, that element matches all frames. (This means that any subsequent elements of spec are never used.)

Alternatively, display can be an alist whose elements have the form (characteristic value...). Here characteristic specifies a way of classifying frames, and the values are possible classifications which display should apply to. Here are the possible values of characteristic:

type
The kind of window system the frame uses--either x, pc (for the MS-DOS console), w32 (for MS Windows 9X/NT), or tty.
class
What kinds of colors the frame supports--either color, grayscale, or mono.
background
The kind of background-- either light or dark.

If an element of display specifies more than one value for a given characteristic, any of those values is acceptable. If an element of display has elements for more than one characteristic, then each characteristic of the frame must match one of the values specified for it.

Internally, defface uses the symbol property face-defface-spec to record the face attributes specified in defface, saved-face for the attributes saved by the user with the customization buffer, and face-documentation for the documentation string.


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