Anti-Aliasing

Anti-Aliasing

The blurring of the jagged "stair-step" appearance in graphical elements such as lines, curves, circles, and particularly in fonts. Jagged edges occur when the resolution of an image is too coarse to achieve the appearance of smoothness. Thus, smoothing can blur the roughness of a jagged line by shading or colouring neighbouring pixels. This technique makes the transition between light and dark (or between two colours) less distinct and therefore less visible, at the cost of making it look more blurry.

Also known as smoothing, and sometimes abbreviated to simply AA.

Contributed by: Dr Pat Cryer