William Chops Westfield wrote:

> I'm also inclined to believe that anti-aliasing fonts is not
> a particularly good idea unless your pixel size is significantly
> smaller than the line-width used to draw the font.  ie, if you're
> left with no pixels illuminated at 'full brightness', you've paid
> too much contract penalty to eliminate "jaggies"...
>   

Hi Bill,

Your pessimism is as subjective as my optimism! However, there's 
probably a way to objectively quantify the effects of pixelation on two 
color images. I suspect the theory is not too unlike the theory 
describing quantization noise introduced by A2D converters. In some 
sense, there's the A2D process (pixel quantization) and the D2A process 
(your interpretation of the quantized image). The intermediate 
intensities introduced at the adjacent pixels is somewhat like applying 
dither to an A2D converter to increase its dynamic range.

There's obviously a limit at which it makes no sense to apply 
anti-aliasing techniques to compensate for pixelation. For example, if 
you quantize the image area down to 1 pixel, then there's no way that 
varying the intensity will recover the image!

Scott
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