Duplicating Artboards

[jennifercox]

I get an error message when trying to duplicate an artboard. It says it cannot create the artboard outside the canvas. Please rearrange and try again.

I only have 18 letter size artboards. Shouldn't I be able to have more than this? I am working on a medical supply catalog and I will have close to 100 artboards or more.

[Monika Gause]

InDesign would be a better application to make this.

Which version are you using?

Only the most recent one can create more than 100 artboards. And also only the most recent one will create artboards in the next row automatically.

[JETalmage · Accepted solution]

I only have 18 letter size artboards. Shouldn't I be able to have more than this?

You can create more artboards than that. But Illustrator's page treatment has always had the ill-conceived interface of positioning the initial page at the center of its limited pasteboard. This was not even changed when Illustrator very belatedly finally gained the ability to have more than one page in that limited space. So duplicated pages, by default, are created rightward and downward in that limited space. So you run into the right bounds of that space in half the time you should. That's why the message suggests you re-arrange the artboards.

By way of comparison, Illustrator's historic competitor, FreeHand, also consisted of a "page spreading" rather than a "page flipping" interface and had a similarly-sized limited pasteboard. But FreeHand's initial page was always more intelligently positioned at the lower left origin of that space, according to Cartesian 2D coordinate convention. So duplicated pages proceeded from the left, not from the center, before wrapping vertically, so did not prematurely run out of space.

When FreeHand gained its multi-page capability (long before Illustrator), its treatment was also much more useable. From the first introduction of the feature, multiple pages could be selected, aligned, distributed, and abided to grid snaps just like ordinary objects. There was no need to put the program in a page-manipulation "mode." There was simply a separate tool for selecting pages. It was entirely less tedious than Illustrator's belated treatment.

JET

[jennifercox]

Appreciate it!

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[kayr23628964]

What is infuriating is that "new artboard" is able to place an artboard on the canvas if there is no room for it, but duplicate artboard always tries to place the new artboard aligned with the highest artboard and to the right of the most far right artboard, and if that falls off the canvas it fails.