"A technique used ... to make diagonals ... appear smoother" [http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=antialias&action=Search]. Commonly applied nowadays in typograpy: "The most common example is black characters on a white background." [[... relate to [TkGS], [Good Looking Tk], Nextgen Tk, Revitalized Tk, [Xft support], ...]] Antialiasing is ''not'' an unalloyed good, as Joel, for example, recognizes in his "Three Wrong Ideas ..." [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html]. [DKF]: I'm not sure that I agree with Joel. But ''bad'' antialiasing isn't worthwhile, I'd agree. [KPV]: Of course its a matter of taste, but I've never liked antialiased fonts. To me they seem to have a blurry color which I find distracting. [TV] In computer graphics, anti-aliasing is usually to prevent artifacts in images which usually become indeed neater to look at in the process, for instance when a ray-tracing image 'shoots' more than one ray per image pixel to make edges not artificially 'gridded' to the pixels in the image. The colouring ''can'' be a result of an antialiasing, or resolution enhancement simulation making use of the fact that pixels on a CRT or other screen are composed of usually red, green, and blue, which are arranged in some constellation per image pixel, and the per colour pixels are 1/3 of the size of a 'whole' image pixel. Alternatively, it could be that a screen with a small number of RGB quantisation values, or a small colour table (or software which runs on a beter screen but things limited) does a bad job at creating intermediate grey levels by setting unequal rgb components.