How to remove the smoothing effect Illustrator does when exporting PNG files?

Question

I'm making an illustration that contains only black lines, on a white background. The lines are 1 pixel thick. Sometimes those lines will curve a bit. Sometimes there will be a circle. But the stroke is always 1 pixel.

Now, when I export the png file, I get a smoothing effect, that is useful for visual purposes, however, for programming reasons, I want to have a perfect 1 pixel by 1 pixel square in a perfect coordinate, not blurry edges that transform 1 pixel in 4 or 5 to make it look good.

Is there any way to create/export this file that way?.

Answer 1

What you are describing is called anti-aliasing. This is what usually happens when you export a vector image to a raster image. Specifically, the purpose of this is to ensure that the images are rendered with smooth lines rather than pixelated lines. This is the default behaviour when exporting as a raster image.

However, you can easily output images without ant-aliasing. In Illustrator click File > Export As, choose a raster format such as JPEG, PNG or TIFF, and switch off the anti-aliasing option.

If you want to preview the pixels in Illustrator as you work on them you can switch off anti-aliasing in the Preferences under the General tab, and you can switch to Pixel Preview under the View main menu option.

Here I have switched off anti-aliasing in the preferences and switched to Pixel Preview.

To the right above is the "Export As" dialog, and below is the output file