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.