Progressive rescaling does make a difference

My dad learned calculus from this book: Practical mathematics, theory and practice with applications to industrial business and military problems. I wanted to include a photo of the title page from his copy of it in a little biography we’re working on for him, but I ended up with jaggies when using my scaleimage tool. favr.dev’s Java – resize image without losing quality led me to the The Perils of Image.getScaledInstance() Blog (2015, originally on java.net). It says: When upscaling an image… the choice is fairly simple: for speed, use RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_NEAREST_NEIGHBOR; for good quality, use RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BILINEAR; or for even better quality, use RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BICUBIC… When downscaling an image, the choice is slightly more complex. The same advice regarding RenderingHints given for upscaling is generally applicable to downscaling as well. However, be aware that if you try to downscale an image by a factor of more than two…