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GraphicsAcademy.com > Glossary > Anti-Aliased Text

Anti-Aliased Text

Anti-aliasing is a method of drawing text or pictures which smooths edges, and avoids jagged edges ("jaggies").

In this article we'll discuss anti-aliasing as applied to drawing text.

Imagine that we wish to place a character glyph from an outline font on a bitmap. Looking at it closely (enlarging so that you can see the individual pixels), it might look something like this example:

Overlaying a Glyph on a Pixel Grid

There is an obvious problem, if you look closely at the above diagram. Namely, when we try to convert the glyph to a bitmap ("rasterise"), we can only have a single color for each individual pixel, but some of the cells in the pixel grid contain both red and white.

So how do we address this problem?

A simple solution (not anti-aliased) would be to look at each pixel cell:

If the pixel cell contains nothing but white, we make the pixel white.
If the pixel cell contains nothing but red, we make the pixel red.
If the pixel cell contains both red and white, we can choose to make the pixel red or white. For example, we might choose whichever color covers a larger proportion of the cell.

Here's an example of how this might look:

The Glyph Rasterised
Not Anti-Aliased

That isn't bad, but as you can see, it does look a little bit jagged (see "Jaggies").

This problem can be addressed by modifying our method of rasterising the glyph. This new method (anti-aliasing) works:

As before: If the pixel cell contains nothing but white, we make the pixel white.
As before: If the pixel cell contains nothing but red, we make the pixel red.
However: If the pixel cell contains both red and white, we make the pixel an intermediate color between red or white (a lighter shade of red).
- The more white in the pixel cell, the lighter (more whitish) we make the final pixel color.
- The more red in the pixel cell, the redder we make the final pixel color.

Here is the result it produces:

The Glyph Rasterised
Anti-Aliased

This time, it doesn't look jagged, but it does (to some eyes at least), look a little blurred. This difference will become clearer when we compare the images at their final sizes.

Finally, here is a comparison, at actual size, of text which has been anti-aliased, and text which has not been. (I have also included a comparison between two blocks of black and white text - in this case, the anti-aliasing is done using shades of gray rather than red).

Not Anti-Aliased	Anti-Aliased

Related Pages on this site:

Alpha Transparency (Definition)
Anti-Aliased Scaling (Definition)
Anti-Aliasing (Definition)
Halo (Definition)

Related Web Sites:

TrueType and anti-aliasing

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