FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greg Landweber, author of Kaleidoscope, Power Windows, and Greg’s Browser,
is pleased to announce the release of SmoothType 2.2.1, available now from:
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/
SmoothType is a shareware control panel that brings Mac OS X style font
smoothing to machines running System 7 through Mac OS 9. SmoothType also
works in the Classic environment under Mac OS X, giving Classic
applications text that looks just as good as in Carbon and Cocoa
applications.
SmoothType effectively doubles the resolution of text on the screen by
blurring the edges of bitmap fonts with shades of gray, a technique called
“anti-aliasing”. Although Apple introduced a limited form of font smoothing
in Mac OS 8.5, SmoothType offers greater flexibility and uses a more
aggressive algorithm–similar to how Adobe Acrobat views PDF files–that
produces much better results. Apple is now switching to such smoothed text
in Mac OS X, but only for applications that use the Quartz graphics engine.
Version 2.2.1 averts a crash at startup on Power Macs running systems prior
to Mac OS 9. It also fixes problems with inverted text and the font
Courier. Version 2.2 adjusts the text smoothing algorithm to make text less
blurry, and in particular, smoothed text now looks much better on LCD
screens. This version also adds optimizations for PowerPC G3 and G4
processors, and it supports Multiple Users under Mac OS 9.
SmoothType pioneered the use of system-wide text anti-aliasing when it was
first released as “Greg’s Hack” at MacHack 1995.
— Greg Landweber
greg@kaleidoscope.net
