Glossary » antialiasing
antialiasing
drawing graphics with smooth blends of colors along edges to avoid sudden shifts of color between pixels and give a smoother appearance. When a line is drawn on a computer screen, the common way to draw it in the early days was with black and white pixels on a grid — the line thus had jagged edges. Antialiasing is a method for drawing the line using intermediate gray pixels to smooth it out. Antialiasing can be used for any graphic shape and is used to render letters also (sometimes called “font smoothing”).
Unsmoothed, or aliased, images have sharp corners called “jaggies”. Removing those corners with intermediate colors is called “smoothing”, “dejagging”, or “antialiasing”.
