What fonts support a large number of weights? / How to fake font-weight?

Question

Specs:

• JS required amyway on site. but prefer pure-CSS/HTML
• IE7+, iPhone supported
• Old browsers (e.g. IE6) not supported
• Standard HTML with no crazy kludges (eg cufon, images, cifr).

Questions:

1. What fonts support 4 or more weights? Most seem to only have one or two. Answers so far:
   • Myriad Pro (supposedly? test below fails for me)
2. How can I degrade gracefully to some other styling that mimics the perceptual effect of font weight?

Relevant links:

• http://www.clagnut.com/blog/2228/ (1 yr old)
• http://clagnut.com/sandbox/fontweight.html (my OSX.6 Firefox & Safari show only two weights)
• http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/340923/what-is-the-most-readable-appealing-font
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/929537/all-about-choosing-the-right-font-for-a-website
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/410461/font-typeface-selection-for-the-web
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38336/on-the-web-what-fonts-should-i-use-to-create-an-equivalent-experience-cross-plat

Answer 1

The first question is not what fonts support a large number of weights: It's whether the browsers do.

The answer, as far as I can see, is, no they don't, not reliably. normal and bold are the only two weights you can work with really.

See the related question here. I think this 2009 Blog post still holds true:

Font-weight is still broken in all but one browser

Update: I overlooked that you already link to that particular post, sorry. I think it's still the state of the nation - at least, I doubt this is achievable for IE 7 without Cufon, sIFR and similar.

Update 2: See Eric Meyer's test suite for a live example to test on.