CSS font-weight thicker than 900?

I have a panel which can be expanded or minimised through a vertically centred link with a < or > symbol as the link text. At font-weight: 900 this does not stand out much, even with a large grey background around it. I do not wan开发者_StackOverflow社区t to use an image and, at the current font size, both symbols currently take up the maximum width of the panel.

Is there any way to thicken the line on the symbols beyond 900? Or is there another alternative I could use?

Thanks in advance.

Richard

In CSS 3 there's another way to make the font size bolder:

color:#888888;    
text-shadow: 2px 0 #888888;
letter-spacing:2px;
font-weight:bold;

EDIT:

For some sort of weird reason this doesn't look as pretty as it did over an year ago. It only works with text-shadow of 1px (on most common fonts, other thicker fonts might still work with 2px). And with text-shadow of only 1px, there's no need for such a large letter-spacing.

color:#888888;    
text-shadow: 1px 0 #888888;
letter-spacing:1px;
font-weight:bold;

To add to Gogutz answer, you can go even bolder by stacking up the text-shadows in a grid. Comma separate each on the line:

.extra-bold {
  text-shadow: 0px 1px, 1px 0px, 1px 1px;
}

You can use text-shadow instead of font-weight

text-shadow: 0px 1px, 1px 0px, 1px 0px;

Unfortunately there's no font-weight thicker than 900, and specifying font-weight by number varies across browsers. Your best bet would be to use a thicker font - you haven't specified what you're using, but Impact is relatively thick and tall for its width while being web-safe. Otherwise you could use @font-face to load in a different font.

Adding to Gogutz answer. You can use the currentcolor keyword to use the color of the text and avoid hardcoding it.

Like this:

text-shadow: 0.5px 0 currentColor;
letter-spacing: 0.5px;

This is quite thick. But works only with webkit.

font-size: -webkit-xxx-large;
font-weight: 900;