Making a font look thinner or lighter?

["Stuart Burnfield" <stuartb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I need to change a product's name and appearance throughout a book.
The client wishes the product name to appear in the TradeMarker font
to match all the new marketing material. Unfortunately TradeMarker
looks very thick, dark and wide next to the body font, which is
Garamond 10.5 pt. Pages where the product name appears several times
have that 'squashed bugs on the windscreen' effect.

I tried three things to make the product names less obtrusive:

1. Dropping the size down a point. TradeMarker 9.5 pt doesn't look
   so bad next to Garamond 10.5 pt, but if I hard-code the size to
   9.5 pt for body text I'd have to create other character tags
   with the size hard-coded for each heading style.

2. Keeping the size As Is and changing the colour to Dark Gray. This
   is a little better but still makes the product names stand out.

3. Tinkering with Stretch and Spread to make each letter narrower
   while increasing the space between each letter. This keeps each
   product name the same length while making it look lighter. But
   maybe this defeats the purpose of using a standard font, and is
   probably evil from a typographical viewpoint.

I guess what I'd like is some way to making the font look thinner
or lighter, and to do it so that one character tag will work for
both body text and all the sizes of heading. I'm not optimistic,
but does anyone have a suggestion?

BTW using different fonts is not an option for now at least.

Thanks
---
Stuart Burnfield
Gentoo Communications
mailto:stuartb@tpg.com.au


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