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    When drawing icons at low resolution, diagonal lines will not look as straight as vertical or horizontal lines. One solution is to avoid diagonal lines when possible, but that causes obvious limitations. Another solution is to antialias the line, by using a filter to soften its edges. Close up this makes the line look blurred, but at a distance, where individual pixels can not be picked out so easily this removed the jagged look of the line.
Another artifact of diagonal lines is that they appear thinner than the equivalent horizontal or vertical lines. A general rule is that if you want to make a diagonal line look the same thickness as a horizontal line, then make it 1.5 times thicker than it was. A thickness of 1.5 may not be possible, unless the line is already more than one pixel thick. Antialiasing may also be used to provide the impression that a line is 1.5 pixels thick, and that is discussed further in the anitaliasing section.