FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greg Landweber, author of Kaleidoscope, Power Windows, and Greg’s Browser,
is pleased to announce the release of SmoothType 2.3, available now from:
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/
SmoothType is a shareware ($10) control panel that brings Mac OS X style
font smoothing to Macs running System 7 through Mac OS 9.2. Under Mac OS X,
SmoothType gives Classic applications text that looks just as good as (or
even better than) 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 using such smoothed text in Mac
OS X, but only for applications that use the Quartz graphics engine.
Version 2.3 offers subpixel smoothing optimized for LCD (flat panel)
screens, which separately manipulates the red, green, and blue parts of
each pixel, effectively tripling the resolution. It also fixes a glitch
smoothing popup menus that use the system font. SmoothType 2.3 is a 108K
download.
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
