Anti-aliasing characters for improved display on an interlaced television monitor is described. In one implementation, an expanded character is generated by increasing a character's original dimensions. The expanded character includes multiple sub-blocks and each sub-block includes multiple pixels. The pixels of each sub-block are mapped to a single destination color that is based on specific numbers of foreground pixels in the sub-block and a particular number of gray levels used to represent the character. Subsequent to this mapping, the expanded character is scaled back to its original size.