Next: Positioning Point, Previous: User-Defined Specs, Up: Formatting Variables

#### 9.4.5 Formatting Fonts

There are specs for highlighting, and these are shared by all the format variables. Text inside the ‘`%(`’ and ‘`%)`’ specifiers will get the special `mouse-face` property set, which means that it will be highlighted (with `gnus-mouse-face`) when you put the mouse pointer over it.

Text inside the ‘`%{`’ and ‘`%}`’ specifiers will have their normal faces set using `gnus-face-0`, which is `bold` by default. If you say ‘`%1{`’, you'll get `gnus-face-1` instead, and so on. Create as many faces as you wish. The same goes for the `mouse-face` specs—you can say ‘`%3(hello%)`’ to have ‘`hello`’ mouse-highlighted with `gnus-mouse-face-3`.

Text inside the ‘`%<<`’ and ‘`%>>`’ specifiers will get the special `balloon-help` property set to `gnus-balloon-face-0`. If you say ‘`%1<<`’, you'll get `gnus-balloon-face-1` and so on. The `gnus-balloon-face-*` variables should be either strings or symbols naming functions that return a string. When the mouse passes over text with this property set, a balloon window will appear and display the string. Please refer to Tooltips, (in GNU Emacs) or the doc string of `balloon-help-mode` (in XEmacs) for more information on this. (For technical reasons, the guillemets have been approximated as ‘`<<`’ and ‘`>>`’ in this paragraph.)

Here's an alternative recipe for the group buffer:

         ;; Create three face types.
         (setq gnus-face-1 'bold)
         (setq gnus-face-3 'italic)

         ;; We want the article count to be in
         ;; a bold and green face.  So we create
         ;; a new face called my-green-bold.
         (copy-face 'bold 'my-green-bold)
         ;; Set the color.
         (set-face-foreground 'my-green-bold "ForestGreen")
         (setq gnus-face-2 'my-green-bold)

         ;; Set the new & fancy format.
         (setq gnus-group-line-format
               "%M%S%3{%5y%}%2[:%] %(%1{%g%}%)\n")

I'm sure you'll be able to use this scheme to create totally unreadable and extremely vulgar displays. Have fun!

Note that the ‘`%(`’ specs (and friends) do not make any sense on the mode-line variables.