Is it possible to get Castoro slightly thinner?

[danz54]

Hello =)

I really like Castoro, but the Regular-Typeface is always a bit too thick/bold for me. ...which is why I often can't use it after all =(
Would it be possible to get slightly thinner variant as Book? (and possibly a second as Light?)

Thanks in advance, Pete

[tiroj]

Yes, the regular weight is fairly heavy, which is a result of matching the weight of the text type used in the Murty Classical Library of India volumes published by Harvard University Press.

I don’t have any current plans to develop lighter weights of the design. But now that the sources are available with interpolatable Regular–Bold weights, it would be possible to fork such development by extrapolating a lighter master. Some aspects of this would need manual tuning: the relative weight of the capitals and lowercase need to be adjusted as the weight changes, and the thickness of diagonal strokes will need adjusting. The italic will probably require more work than the roman. The biggest problem is that the straight srokes and bowls lose weight at different rates, so the lighter you extrapolate the more uneven the design looks.

These are straight extrapolations of the roman, with no manual editing. The ‘Book’ is not too bad as a start, but the ‘Light’ is very uneven and beginning to show the strain.

[danz54]

Hi tiroj, thank you for your response =)

Can you please provide the Book-Variant? I've had no possibilities to fork or use the source-files....

Greets Pete

[tiroj]

The Book variant doesn’t exist. The illustration was a crude extrapolation of the existing design space, and I wouldn’t be comfortable making that available as a distributable file without extensive review of all the glyphs and behaviour. Also, it would not be properly useful without a matching Book Italic, and I would expect that to require a lot more manual adjustment of the extrapolated outlines.

It is doable, but I don’t have time or funding, so is the sort of thing that would probably only happen as a by-product of other work (in the same way that Castoro is a by-product of the Murty/Tiro Indic work).