What are jaggies?
Jaggies is the slang term for the blurry jagged lines that can appear in computer graphics. They typically occur in raster, also known as bitmap, images with decreased resolution. The lines resemble stairsteps and appear in place of straight lines or curves at the edges of the image. Bitmap images often have jaggies because they are made of separate square pixels of varying colors and shades. When their size is changed, a process called aliasing adds or removes pixels in such a way that an error of representation, also known as an artifact, emerges. The artifacts often have a stairstep-like appearance because of this addition or subtraction of pixels around the image’s edges. Non-raster graphics, known as vector graphics, rely on a mathematical formula instead of pixels to represent images. This is why vector graphics do not produce jaggies.
