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Problem seems to me so incredibly simple it boggles my mind it isnt a feature everywhere:

When drawing a line/square/circle/any other shape the lines are automatically anti-aliased between primary and secondary color and some tweak-able settings.

The question stems from the situation: I am not a pixel artist. I do not plan on becoming one. I do however get quite quickly annoyed by stand-in graphics in projects which are HORRIBLY UGLY. At the moment I need to draw a set of 8 arrows (which warrants its own question) and some related stuff to visualize what the pathfinding algorithm is doing. I dont want my arrows to be ugly but i dont want to spend time manually antialiasing their lines either. Soon enough i will want more shapes too...

Pls halp Q__Q :D :*

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  • Pixel art isnt usually antialiased? Also what is everywhere? Anyway you should probably use vector tools for this. Anyway a arrow is 3 or 7 lines so if you can do a line you can do arrows.
    – joojaa
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 20:37
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    Pixel art isn't anti-aliased. Also what do you consider ugly? What are you trying to avoid? Not sure I understand this question at all. Can you edit your question and perhaps add an image that shows what you want or don't want. Thanks
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 22:46
  • To all peopel who think pixelart doesnt use antialiasing - please take a look at what is actually happening on the internet instead of your own visions. There are tons of manually antialiased pixel art and tons of tutorials how to do it.
    – Maciej
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 9:37
  • @Maciej Sure, but inorder for us to advice we need to know exacty what kind of antialiasing you want. But in general we abide by the most common definition of the word as defined by wikipedia I remeber antialiasing by hand years ago, but since everything i use today allready does antialiasing i dont. And yes in general most competent applications actually do antialias if theres info beyond the pixels as to how to do it. We dont ususally call using photoshop to make pixel perfect art with antialiasing pixel art.
    – joojaa
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 11:41

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The term pixel art is normally used for the artform where each pixel in an image is deliberately placed by hand. If there's anti-aliasing it's also done by hand.

It seems that what you want to make is simply raster images of geometric shapes.

This is easiest done in a vector graphics application like Adobe Illustrator or the free Inkscape.

Set up a artboard/canvas/drawing surface (or whatever it's called in the program you end up using) with the pixel dimensions you want, construct your shapes and export an anti-aliased PNG.

The drawing process could look like this for a 64 x 64 px image (just a quick, sloppy example in Adobe Illustrator):

The exported, anti-aliased PNG would look like this:

At 400% you can see the anti-aliasing:

If you are going to display these shapes on a website or use them in a printed publication, you wouldn't turn them into raster graphics. Instead keep them as scalable vector and export SVG for web or AI/EPS/PDF for print.

(An alternative could be to draw aliased raster images at 2x or 4x size and then scale them down in an image editor using bicubic interpolation. That will introduce anti-aliasing. But if you have no special reason for doing this, I would recommend using vector instead - it's way easier.)

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  • This is actually quite a clever idea, thank you for the animation as it is quite informative - however, i would prefer something MUCH less complicated than inkscape if possible - are you aware by chance of any other software than the two You listed?
    – Maciej
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 9:39
  • @Maciej Just draw it at 4 times the size in any application and downsample the image. No antialasing can happen fif you dont haveany info as to what happens between the pixel. Inkscape probably isnt all that complicated if you jsut draw arrows.
    – joojaa
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 11:49

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