Talk:Anti-aliasing

Broad concept article
Anti-aliasing was not too long ago renamed Spatial anti-aliasing because of its narrow focus on imaging. This left a gap in coverage of the topic that I tried to fill with this disambiguation page. It was definitely the quick thing to do. Please convince me it was not the right thing to do. --Kvng (talk) 20:10, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I think that the move/dab was a good idea. The aliasing article is a fairly comprehensive discussion of the problems solved by anti-aliasing. Any article that pointed to this but was talking about anti-aliasing in general should point to aliasing. Perhaps anti-aliasing should redirect to aliasing with a disambiguation tag at the top? --Mblumber (talk) 20:15, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Category:Anti-Aliasing
Too narrow a topic for a Category Robert.Harker (talk) 16:13, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

With or without a hyphen?
In Spatial anti-aliasing, I noticed sixty-some instances of anti-aliasing with a hyphen, and only four instances of antialiasing without a hyphen. Before deferring to the majority, I decided to check a dictionary.

At first it seemed Wikipedia got it wrong. I found multiple dictionaries giving antialiasing, without the hyphen, as the main entry for the noun.


 * Dictionary.com (Random House): antialiasing
 * Oxford Dictionaries (U.S. English): antialiasing
 * Wiktionary:antialiasing

Digging deeper however, I found some support for the hyphen. The hyphen appears to be preferred in British English. It's at least acceptable in U.S. English, as an author's choice for clarity.


 * MOS:HYPHEN talks about trends and tendencies of hyphenation for prefixes, not absolute rules. It defers to dictionaries, but I don't see a clear enough answer from dictionaries on this particular word.
 * Dictionary.com (Collins): anti-alias
 * An Oxford Reference search shows both antialiasing and anti-aliasing, with a noticeable preference for the hyphen in British English contexts.
 * Google web search results are about equally divided.
 * The Chicago Manual of Style (cited in Grammarly: hyphen in anti-aging?) seems to encourage hyphenation for clarity, when anti- is followed by a vowel.

So I'm deciding in favor of the hyphen, at least for today, in the spirit of MOS:COMMONALITY.

For the future, I encourage lexicographers to clarify U.S. and British orthography for this word, especially in its verb and adjective forms. If that happens, then we should revisit these Wikipedia pages again, and confirm we're presenting the word in a way that's consistent with MOS:ENGVAR and MOS:RETAIN.

Mrevan (talk) 09:32, 2 May 2016 (UTC)