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#### 3.18.2 Article Fontisizing

People commonly add emphasis to words in news articles by writing things like ‘`_this_`’ or ‘`*this*`’ or ‘`/this/`’. Gnus can make this look nicer by running the article through the `W e` (`gnus-article-emphasize`) command.

How the emphasis is computed is controlled by the `gnus-emphasis-alist` variable. This is an alist where the first element is a regular expression to be matched. The second is a number that says what regular expression grouping is used to find the entire emphasized word. The third is a number that says what regexp grouping should be displayed and highlighted. (The text between these two groupings will be hidden.) The fourth is the face used for highlighting.

         (setq gnus-emphasis-alist
               '(("_\\(\\w+\\)_" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-underline)
                 ("\\*\\(\\w+\\)\\*" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-bold)))

By default, there are seven rules, and they use the following faces: `gnus-emphasis-bold`, `gnus-emphasis-italic`, `gnus-emphasis-underline`, `gnus-emphasis-bold-italic`, `gnus-emphasis-underline-italic`, `gnus-emphasis-underline-bold`, and `gnus-emphasis-underline-bold-italic`.

If you want to change these faces, you can either use `M-x customize`, or you can use `copy-face`. For instance, if you want to make `gnus-emphasis-italic` use a red face instead, you could say something like:

         (copy-face 'red 'gnus-emphasis-italic)

If you want to highlight arbitrary words, you can use the `gnus-group-highlight-words-alist` variable, which uses the same syntax as `gnus-emphasis-alist`. The `highlight-words` group parameter (see Group Parameters) can also be used.

See Customizing Articles, for how to fontize articles automatically.