Adobe ScreenReady is designed to bridge the gap between PostScript and the world of bitmaps. It’s a utility that essentially lets multimedia designers design with PostScript and then “print” to pixels, creating a PICT file.
ScreenReady includes two programs, ScreenReady for QuickDraw and ScreenReady PostScript. ScreenReady for QuickDraw works like a virtual printer. You select ScreenReady in the Chooser, choose Print from any application, tell ScreenReady where to save the finished bitmaps, and “print.” ScreenReady PostScript, on the other hand, batch-processes all the EPS files in a selected folder and deposits the rendered images in a different folder. ScreenReady PostScript includes the same PostScript interpreter Adobe puts in PostScript printers.
Which program you use depends partly on the file to be processed. The rule of thumb is that if an application can render the file properly to the screen as a preview, then ScreenReady for QuickDraw is sufficient for processing. If the file includes elements like gradients, which render poorly in previews, then you need to go to the PostScript utility.
But these programs offer surprisingly different features, and users may find themselves betwixt and between when it comes to getting the feature set needed for a job.
For example, ScreenReady for QuickDraw can dither graphics to custom palettes, or it can generate its own custom palettes and even superpalettes. ScreenReady PostScript can dither only to the System palette, to a gray-scale palette, or to black and white (1 bit). On the other hand, ScreenReady PostScript offers finer control over antialiasing than ScreenReady for QuickDraw does.
ScreenReady for QuickDraw can print a multipage document, but the PostScript program requires you to save each page as a separate EPS file before processing. On the plus side, you can set ScreenReady PostScript to run in the background and watch a certain folder — the program automatically processes any EPS file dropped into that folder. This is great for nenvorked workgroups.
One nice feature both programs offer is the ability to render files with a precalculated alpha channel. This makes it a snap to select rendered graphics and antialias them to a new background — or to antialias titles to video backgrounds.
Still in its debut version, this package has some problems. My biggest complaint is with the overactive antialiasing function. In ScreenReady, antialiasing is always applied to both PostScript and bitmap art. So, for example, if you have an Adobe PageMaker file that includes text on top of a scanned photograph, ScreenReady not only antialiases the text to the background, it also antialiases any sharp lines within the photograph. Result: a blurry picture. Antialiasing of bitmaps would be a useful option, were it optional.
In version 1.O, ScreenReady’s custom palette feature failed to work at times. The superpalette function isn’t as robust as it should be (it has no base palettes). and is completely undocumented. It also consistently produced palettes with fewer colors in them than I asked for, which leads to images that are dithered more than need be. And ScreenReady repeatedly produced dithering errors when processing both bitmaps and Illustrator files embedded in PostScript documents.
The Last Word
Despite these problems, ScreenReady may fill a gap in many people’s multimedia production process. It will be useful for people who want to reuse existing documents and artwork. And ScreenReady fills a real need in the multimedia world by giving screen designers easier access to the full range of typographic and layout tools on which print designers rely. Let’s just hope Adobe puts this particular product on an evolutionary fiist track.
Matazonni, Joe. (December 1995). Adobe ScreenReady 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 71).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
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adobe_screenready.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
