Version 1.1.6 of SmoothText is now available. The only change is speed optimizations for the skinning engine. Performance isn't yet where I'd like it to be, but it's noticeably faster. Both the NT4 and W2k versions will see a speed boost when the skinning engine is active, though the W2k version will see a greater improvement since it supports SSE2 whereas NT4 only supports MMX.

I took the night off from Windows patches and made some more improvements to SmoothText. This version fixes some bugs in the last version and adds further speed improvements for newer CPU's that support SSE4.1 instructions (many dual-core and quad-core CPU's support them). These optimizations only affect the W2k version, but I also improved the internal bitmap code to pre-align images along 16-byte boundaries. This was important to realize the full benefit on the W2k version but also has the potential to result in a modest speed improvement for the NT4 version. Version 1.1.7 is now available with the changes.

Edited February 15, 201115 yr by WildBill

SmoothText 1.1.8 is now available; it includes a small fix for Firefox 4 compatibility.

Enjoy,

I'm trying to run SmoothText on an old computer with a Pentium III 866MHz processor.

It's incredibly slow. The CPU usage jumps up to 50% just by running SmoothText and becomes almost unusable

Is there any way to speed it up?

Really bad rendering problem with text editors using Scintilla control. The control is used in Notepad++, Scite, Notepad2, and a whole lot more tools.

The problem is inserted strings of spaces, particularly when font characteristics change within a line.

The problem will be easy for you to spot, just load some source code into Notepad++ and you'll see it.

At least the source code for Scintilla is available.

Hope you can find a solution because the problem really is a deal breaker.

--

Bill

Will there be any future updates for this?

The skins are pretty glitchy on Windows NT 4.0. It causes the taskbar to disappear!