LaTeX - Making a lighter version of text, like anti-bold?

I'm making a LaTeX document for someone. A certain 开发者_Go百科piece of text looks "bold" for them, even though I'm not using the \textbf command. It's just a normal default LaTeX font. Is there any command to make a 'lighter version', i.e. make the text lighter, thinner? Something that looks to normal text, what normal text looks to bold?

\font\tenrm = cmr17 at 10pt
\tenrm

Note that \fontseries doesn't define what's available for any given font -- it accepts anything in the font definition files for the font family. the set is defined in the document fontname (ctan info/fontname), and definitely does contain light.

so the complaint is that fonts that the user has encountered either don't have light weights, or whoever wrote the .fd file didn't include it. that knuth's (metafont) fonts contain an extra-bold weight by default, but not anything light, is something to go away and think about.

If you're interested in making just a small section lighter, you could use

\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{light}{rgb}{0.5, 0.5, 0.5}
\def\light#1{{\color{light}#1}}

then wrap some text you want to make lighter in

\light{some text to make lighter}

The ´strange path´ error means that metafont does not know how to fill a shape. Imagine the lines as really being drawn along a path, so you have a drawing direction and a left/right side. If you draw a circle you can then fill the left or the right side of the path. This does not work for a figure 8 since the inside of the figure becomes the outside and vice versa. This is called a strange path. When scaling down a font exactly this can happen. The only solution is to change the metafont code.

Use the excellent Computer Modern Bright font

\usepackage{cmbright}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}