30.12.1 Requesting to Edit Formatted Text

Whenever you visit a file that Emacs saved in the text/enriched format, Emacs automatically converts the formatting information in the file into Emacs's own internal format (known as text properties), and turns on Enriched mode.

To create a new file of formatted text, first visit the nonexistent file, then type M-x enriched-mode before you start inserting text. This command turns on Enriched mode. Do this before you begin inserting text, to ensure that the text you insert is handled properly.

More generally, the command enriched-mode turns Enriched mode on if it was off, and off if it was on. With a prefix argument, this command turns Enriched mode on if the argument is positive, and turns the mode off otherwise.

When you save a buffer while Enriched mode is enabled in it, Emacs automatically converts the text to text/enriched format while writing it into the file. When you visit the file again, Emacs will automatically recognize the format, reconvert the text, and turn on Enriched mode again.

You can add annotations for saving additional text properties, which Emacs normally does not save, by adding to enriched-translations. Note that the text/enriched standard requires any non-standard annotations to have names starting with ‘x-’, as in ‘x-read-only’. This ensures that they will not conflict with standard annotations that may be added later.

See Text Properties, for more information about text properties.