Participating Frequently

Question

Add the ability to scale the canvas beyond it's archaic 227 inch limits.

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
May 12, 2012
33 replies
134200 views

Make working with large format designs at 1:1 possible. In other words add a size function for the canvas to be scaled beyond 227 inches. Of course this would allow scaling the artboards beyond that size as well. Not sure if there woudl be implications to allowing it to be unlimited. Us large format print and design companies are annoyed at this daily. Vehicle template packages are at 1/20th scale. Finish the design for the 54 foot trailer and ready to print, scale 2000%. Nope sorry, cant do that. Export the file and open it in some other vector app for the final scaling then export from that to the RIP.

Was really hoping to see this in CS6. Sadly not happening.

Feature request

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steves45061544

Participant

I work in the sign industry and I regularly run into this problem. There seems to be no shortage of brilliant people who tell me to simply scale it. This might work for whatever they use illustrator for, but if you design large scale signage that must be machined from actual materials, then this advice is ignorant moot. Adobe doesn't seem to give a sh!t about the issue at all. The answer, unfortunately, is CorelDraw.

Mirkwoood

Participant

I work as a graphic designer and signmaker for a convention center in Australia. I have 0 control over what software I use, I can have Adobe or I can go and get another job.

The fact is that Illustrator is used all over the signage industry, and all over the sign industry this size limit is a problem. Scaling is not the solution for large scale signage, and for people who don't have control over what software they use, this sucks balls.

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

I know it might seem like a black hole at the moment, but please keep up the pressure on the uservoice link:

Remove canvas size limit – Adobe Illustrator Feedback

If you post here, vote and post there too.

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MixManSC1Author

Participating Frequently

Over 7 years later and this is still getting comments. Wowza!

I'm still using Illy CS6 and have just learned to live with it. I just do the final scaling in FlexiSign which accepts Illustrator files in their native format great (probably since Flexi licenses APPE - Adobe PDF Print Engine as the RIP).

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

For any future finders of this thread, please post and add your vote here instead:

Remove canvas size limit – Adobe Illustrator Feedback

This site is one the Illustrator developers actually read.

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rachellet80063497

Participant

For what it's worth Adobe, can I add my preference for a larger canvas.

While I agree that in most cases of signwriting/large-format-printing, just scaling up a vector image when you go to print is the preferable way to go.

But what happens when the smallest font size you can get is 4pt and you need smaller in order for it to scale up to the correct size. You might incorrectly assume that there is a cut off of point sizes for billboards, but this doesn't account for all the various circumstances where small print is required. I have a long narrow piece of artwork - 1500cm. If I reduce this down to 227cm, ie the longest artboard I can get, then my artboard width becomes very narrow and I can't get the point size for fonts small enough for some of the "legalise small-print" When I enlarge 4pt type, it ends up too big compared with the rest of the layout. I'm going to have to create it in several pieces and stitch it together later, hoping that it matches up right, which will mean cropping vector diagrams in weird places. Which means there is big chance that a path point or curve may move slightly.

Frustrated.

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SJRiegel

Legend

rachellet80063497 wrote
But what happens when the smallest font size you can get is 4pt

Was that true with older versions of Illustrator? I have CC2017, and I can set text as small as 0.1 pt.

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rachellet80063497

Participant

Oh yeah - my bad. I have latest versions of Adobe Suite on Mac and just realised you are right. Maybe it was a preconceived idea that I couldn’t go below 4pt from older versions or other applications. Thx for updating me.

Still think either a larger art board (love the art boards btw) or an automatic scale rule would be ideal. Trying to work out conversions slows work speed considerably and encourages errors.

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annav78789132

Participant

I work in the large format printing. To all those who say 1:1 is silly, please come spend a day with us. It is a struggle everyday to us to make sure all proportions are correct. Most of times we use photos and to be accurate on the quality it is helpful to be able to work 1:1. It is annoying to be thinking about all work outs for this issue. You are also limited to quantity of the artboards, due to the size limitations. I don't want to take extra steps that are wasting my time, where they must be a fix. C'mon Adobe, we live in the 21st century.

I say yes to unlimited size of the boards.

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Does your RIP software not allow you to scale objects to print in specific percentages (for example 200%)? Any decent RIP application should allow specific size scaling along with nesting of multiple jobs to print on the same sheet of material. For our in-house printing it's rare that we have jobs coming out of our HP Latex 360 printers that are any longer than 20 feet. Bigger jobs like billboard faces have to be jobbed out and I'm always uploading those files to the service bureau via ftp at 1" = 1' scale.

If I'm wanting to design signs at full size in Illustrator this becomes a problem is when I'm designing a really large, high rise pylon sign or depicting a building sign on an entire elevation of a building. I often use CorelDRAW for that purpose to take advantage of its larger 1800" X 1800" max art board size. But even in that application I'll end up dumping building elevations down to 50% or 25% of their full scale.

People keep mentioning "unlimited art board size," but I want to know an example of any vector-based drawing application that delivers on such a thing. Everything I've tried (and I've tried a lot) has either had a hard upper limit on art board size or, in the case of certain sign making applications, the application would become increasingly unstable and even crash -that goes for Flexi and its CASmate predecessor. Speaking of Flexi, we use Flexi 12 and Flexi Cloud in my shop for certain sign production tasks, like driving vinyl cutters. But the application is really pretty clunky when it comes to designing signs from scratch. I really don't like its text handling limitations; it doesn't offer complete support of OpenType features.

aTomician

Inspiring

Bobby, I think the golden egg would be to choose the canvas size. That way, if I was working on a small set of icons, I would only need a canvas size of a few hundred pixels that contains the miniature artboards that I need. If I'm working on a signwriting project for the side of a 40 ft shipping container, I could create a canvas accordingly.

This also means that if I'm working on a small project, I select a small canvas, and it will actually make my PC run faster because of the reduced processing.

The way I visualize a larger project working is that when you create a canvas over a certain size, you get a popup saying that the size of the canvas may reduce the stability of the program. It should then warn you to only continue if your laptop is above a certain specification. That way, users do it at their own risk, but any professional graphic designer should have a computer powerful enough to cope with the extra processing, if not then they can expect to have problems.

That way, you get the best of both worlds... get your cake and eat it with a cherry on top.

Regards, aTomician

Franky Spills

Known Participant

Put me down on the Petition for larger Canvas sizes in illustrator.

I work in TV and Film. I'd love to be able to work 1:1 on vehicle wraps, large signs, large props, CNC files and etc. Can I work at a smaller scale and have my vendors scale up on their end to the correct size? Yes. My vendors also have better things to do with their time than fiddle with my art, it sometimes creates issues... and bless their hearts- sometimes they scale incorrectly. We move extremely quickly in my industry I'm sure lots of others on here do as well. There can be miscommunication between me and my vendors when it comes to scaling and final art size.... If I could just say, "Hey guys- it's already set to the proper scale. Just hit print!" My god, they would smile.

I have no idea what it would take on the programming/software side of things to make a larger canvas available to Illustrator's users but I would love to stop bumping into and having to work around this limitation. So would my vendors (printers, cutters, fabricators).

Thanks Adobe. Love your software.

7thheavengtr

Known Participant

Agree. Canvas NEEDS to be allowed to go larger for signage and vehicle wraps.

Shame this is being ignored. I might have to investigate CorelDraw for this job I have now that Illustrator CAN'T do.. even

after it was suggest by many, recommended and submitted as a request YEARS ago. Great Job Adobe, keep up the great work!

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YogeshSharma

Participating Frequently

Hello Everyone,

I am Yogesh from the Illustrator team at Adobe.

We are exploring ways to provide a bigger canvas in Illustrator. Like any other feature, larger canvas has its own share of complexities, functional as well as performance, and we are looking for your feedback. We would like to hear your requirements *if you need larger canvas in your work*.

Please fill out the survey:

U2U Feedback on Larger Canvas Survey

Thanks,

Yogesh

Product Manager

Adobe Illustrator

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InvokeDesign

Participant

Thank you for taking an interest in this, and providing a survey!

I have a similar issue in regards to PDFs, that might not be related to this, but would appreciate a response:

There is a PDF size limitation of 5 meters (about 196.8") that I ran into when printing decals. My cutting software will produce a PDF with registration marks, which is printed, then the cutter reads the marks and cuts out the decals after printing. I am unable to create long strips of decals (for bottle labels in this case) beyond that limit (PDF ends up blank).

Is there any plans to exceed this PDF size limit? It happens on windows and mac, so i imagine its a adobe or postscript error.

Thanks!!!