No more font smoothing (option)
Is it ever okay to remove a user option? Well, the decision was made to do just that with the Font Smoothing option. In the next edition, all text in SSP will be rendered with anti-aliasing turned on (font smoothing enabled).
This option was actually introduced to SSP back in version 4. Previously, all text was anti-aliased - no option was provided. However, as a result of the new technologies introduced in SSP version 4, mainly animations and effects, font smoothing become far more complicated. Animating bullet items and maintaining font smoothing was a bigger challenge in version 4 because it required the use of alpha-channel rendering. SSP version 4 relied on the Windows GDI for the rendering of fonts. But the Windows GDI doesn't support alpha-channel rendering -- at least not for text. As a side note, PowerPoint at the time, interestingly, did not support font smoothing with its animations -- they even documented why. I was determined to one-up Microsoft in this area, so I set out to implement alpha-channel text rendering that could be used with animations and effects. I succeeded in this, but at a cost of CPU cycles. At the time, due to the speed of older machines still in use, there was a noticeable difference between text that was rendered with font smoothing and text that wasn't. Because of this, I felt compelled to offer the option, with the default set to enabled.
Things have changed since then (2000), the overhead involved in creating the alpha-channeled text graphics is no longer significant and there is no artistic reason to not use anti-aliasing. Removing this option helps us too because it removes a number of code paths that no longer need to be maintained and tested. Sometimes it feels good to prune a limb or two.
(BE112)