Workflows that need large canvas / artboard

Actual size!

so what do we do in the mean time so annoying , especially as vetcors are preferable to bitmap for size

YES PLEASE!

I'm trying to do a hockey rink billboard that is 264" x 30" and this is now becoming a real pain.

Indeed, please do send the request via that form. Adobe's product managers and engineers prioritize new feature development in large part on the number of requests they receive for a feature or change. Thus, the more requests, the higher the priority for development.

Working in actual size would be greatly appreciated. When I'm designing a mural, a billboard, or signage I prefer to work in actual measurements. Trying to scale things just leaves way too much room for error and takes extra time trying to calculate everything to a scale that will work for the artboard. With the computing power at our fingertips in even cheaper laptops these days, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to do this.

We regularly do Graphic Design work which gets sent to large format printers.

I found this forum while searching for a reason why illustrator and indesign have bleed limits and document size limits.

At times we just do the artwork at full size at 150dpi, but are asked to supply 50mm bleed.

My current document is almost 4 metres wide by 2 high.

The annoying thing is that i can expand my document size to allow for that much bleed but I can't use the document bleed settings. It seems an unnecessary stumbling block. I have to draw my own crop marks and export a pdf without bleed.

If you and the team were to increase the maximum bleed area to something ridiculous like 100mm maximum, that would be so helpful.

thanks.

Rama,

PLEASE increase the canvas size. This is very annoying that Illustrator does not allow you to go beyond 227x227. I run into this restriction many times in our builds. CorelDraw has huge canvas sizes available, the user can type in whatever size art board they want. I do not understand why this is even a restriction, I would think this would be an easy option to add.

Working 1:1 only makes for an easier workflow and less chance of a mistake...and when working on projects larger than 227" mistakes are extremely costly.

On a totally unrelated note please add a dimension function to Illustrator so shop drawings can be dimensioned in Illustrator without having to use a 3rd party add-on

Yep, to me being able to work to scale is a no brainer. Working 1:1 with limitless scaling would make working with large format graphics significantly easier. This is one of the reasons I prefer CorelDraw for large format, but I would much rather work in Illustrator!

It's not just about the overall finished size of a single large display graphic. Even if the final size of a particular project is within the current pasteboard limitations, it is common practice to separate the elements of different vinyl colors on individual Artboards, so that the pieces of each particular color can then be re-arranged and nested so as to maximize vinyl usage, before sending the file to the cutting program. So room for multiple large Artboards at 100% is needed. Doing this, one often has to resort to multiple documents, which is cumbersome.

Of course, the problem of having to work any project of any type at reduced scale is exacerbated by the fact that Illustrator does not provide for user-defined ruler scales.

JET

We save all of our artwork as PDF to our RIP. I believe there is a certain limitation to PDF files - somewhere around 5 meters I think... if we work at 100% on artwork over 5 meters would we still not need to scale the artwork down to under 5 meters to save successfully as a PDF?