Tinta v2.5.0

Tinta v2.5.0 — the performance release

Markdown, distilled. A fast, lightweight Markdown and Mermaid viewer for Windows — also on the Microsoft Store.

Tinta now opens in ~130 ms — 2.6× faster. Profiling showed 68% of startup was GPU driver initialization paid before anything appeared on screen. The first frame now renders on a software target in ~20 ms (pixel-identical — DirectWrite rasterizes glyphs on the CPU either way) while the GPU initializes in the background, then the renderer upgrades to hardware invisibly.

Performance

• Startup: 348.8 ms → 133.4 ms (measured on the built-in stats overlay, warm start)
• Documents lay out ~28% faster: single-line elements no longer shape their text twice, and plain table cells skip a redundant trial measurement
• Images finishing together reflow once, not once per image
• Editor idle CPU is now zero — cursor blink no longer re-shapes every visible line
• Mermaid diagrams stopped recreating stroke styles and node geometries every frame
• Window resizing keeps rendered resources instead of rebuilding them

Fixed

• Images no longer turn into their alt-text placeholders after resizing the window — a long-standing bug that finally surfaced during this profiling round

Installation

1. Download tinta.exe below and run it — no installation required (you may need to click "More info" → "Run anyway" on SmartScreen)
2. Or: Microsoft Store · winget install tinta · scoop install tinta (bucket)
3. Optionally run tinta.exe /register to register Markdown and Mermaid files

What's included

• 10 beautiful themes (5 light, 5 dark)
• Hardware-accelerated rendering via Direct2D
• Native Mermaid flowchart rendering
• Single portable executable under 1 MB, no dependencies