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.