Question

Explain (in your own words) how does JAGGIES happens in text and what is the technique used to mitigate the JAGGIES effect? Mention an application that applies that technique.

Please write, not a screenshot

Answer 1

Jaggies is a term for various kinds of anomalies in computer graphics outputs or display imaging. The result displays shape edges composed of small squares or “steps” instead of a smoothly contoured line.

An effect called aliasing occurs when multiple sampled signals become confused. This is one reason for jaggies to occur. Jaggies can also happen when a display device lacks resolution, or a bitmap is converted into some other format.

Techniques like anti-aliasing or smoothing can help to reduce jaggies. Some of these techniques reduce the pixel size of the display image or try to straighten out programming problems that lead to blocking edges or jaggies.

Causes

Jaggies occur due to the "staircase effect". This is because a line represented in raster mode is approximated by a sequence of pixels. Jaggies can occur for a variety of reasons, the most common being that the output device (display monitor or printer) does not have enough resolution to portray a smooth line. In addition, jaggies often occur when a bit-mapped image is converted to a different resolution. This is one of the advantages that vector graphics have over bitmapped graphics – the output looks the same regardless of the resolution of the output device.

Solutions

The effect of jaggies can be reduced somewhat by a graphics technique known as spatial anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing smooths out jagged lines by surrounding the jaggies with transparent pixels to simulate the appearance of fractionally-filled pixels. The downside of anti-aliasing is that it reduces contrast – rather than sharp black/white transitions, there are shades of gray – and the resulting image is fuzzy. This is an inescapable trade-off: if the resolution is insufficient to display the desired detail, the output will either be jagged or fuzzy, or some combination thereof.

In addition, jaggies often occur when a bit mapped image is converted to a different resolution. They can occur for variety of reasons, the most common being that the output device (display monitor or printer) does not have enough resolution to portray a smooth line.

In realtime computer graphics, especially gaming, anti-aliasing is used to remove jaggies created by the edges of polygons and other lines entirely. Some video game consoles, such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, have publishing policies which mandated the use of anti-aliasing in some games released for them. Some computer graphics on newer video games are not anti-aliased on video game consoles (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), because their hardware can not run graphics smoothly (30 frames per second) if they are anti-aliased. On eighth generation video game consoles, such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, anti-aliasing and frame rate has been heavily improved. Jaggies in bitmaps, such as sprites and surface materials, are most often dealt with by separate texture filtering routines, which are far easier to perform than anti-aliasing filtering. Texture filtering became ubiquitous on PCs after the introduction of 3Dfx's Voodoo GPU.

To fix these nasty jaggies, we must turn on font smoothing or anti-aliasing.

The anti-alias select menu is found next to the other basic font settings at the top of the screen (in CS2 or CS3), when your text is selected or active. Anti-aliasing is set on a per text object basis, so you cannot mix and match settings in one text area.

There are 5 different settings to choose from: none (or off), sharp, crisp, strong and smooth.
Which one you select depends on personal preference, font size and whether you are working on a design for web or print. Experiment to find the setting that best suits your design.

Note: Some times a designer may purposefully not want the fonts to appear smooth, to simulate the appearance of fonts in a web browser etc., in this case selecting none can be handy.