Stairlike lines that appear where there should be smooth straight lines or curves. 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
vector graphics has over
bit-mapped graphics -- the
output looks the same regardless of the resolution of the output device.
The effect of jaggies can be reduced somewhat by a graphics technique known as antialiasing. Antialiasing smoothes out jagged lines by surrounding the jaggies with shaded pixels. In addition, some printers can reduce jaggies with a technique known as smoothing.
