When text or a graphic image is displayed on amonitor,or screen, the smoothness of the edges is limited by the resolution of the screen, which means the edges tend to be a little jagged. This jaggedness is also called aliasing.
There are a variety of techniques used to reduce the jaggies, or the aliasing of text and graphic images, to fool our eyes into thinking the edge is smoother. For instance, in animage editingprogram you can blur the edges, or shade along the lines to make the dark-to-light transition less distinct.Anti-aliasing, then, means to use one of these techniques to smooth out the rough edges (the aliasing).
Antialiasing: A technique employed in computer GRAPHICS to smooth the jagged appearance of text and lines by applying varying shades of colour. Consider a black diagonal line drawn on a white screen background: on a low RESOLUTION display it will appear stepped like a staircase because the positions of screen pixels will not coincide exactly with the desired path of the line. On a screen that can display shades of grey, anti aliasing involves coloring each pixel black if it lies wholly within the line, white if it lies wholly outside the line, but otherwise a shade of grey proportional to the degree with which it overlaps the line.
The same principle works with any foreground and background colour combination, by exploiting a property of the human eye that expects the edges of objects to display some tonal gradation due to light and shadow. Antialiased text is a feature of most sophisticated text processing and design software.
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