Larger Canvas in Illustrator 24.2 – 100x more space!

[Om Nath Jha]

The latest release of Illustrator (24.2) comes with one of the most requested features, a larger canvas with 100x more space to keep all your assets organized in one project.

Now whether you need room to design or create wall art, billboards, advertisements, and more, you can expand your canvas area without worrying about the artwork dimensions, precision, and scale.

Illustrator 24.2 offers a canvas size of 2270 x 2270 inches which lets you create multiple artboards with larger dimensions. You can also use these updated units in the Units drop-down: Feet, Meters, Yards, and Feet & Inches.

To ensure that the new document is created with a larger canvas use the following settings in the New Document dialog:

• Specify the artboard size of more than 227 inches (default canvas size). You can also choose the specified units in Feet, Meters, Yards, or Feet & Inches.
• Large canvas allows you to accommodate more artboards than the default canvas size.

An alert sign is displayed at the bottom of the New document dialog indicating that the specified dimensions are bigger than the default canvas size and the new document will be created on a large canvas. 

Check this link for more details about this feature.

Large canvas FAQs:

Can I copy artwork from a large canvas to the default canvas?

• Yes, you can copy-and-paste artwork from large-sized canvas to the default canvas. However, if the large-scale artwork does not fit in the canvas or hits canvas bounds, the artwork is automatically scaled down to fit into the canvas size. 

Can I save large-scaled artwork as a PDF?

• Yes, you can save your artwork as a PDF.  To view your artwork in actual size, use Acrobat 1.6 or later.
• When you save the large-scaled artwork with the PDF version 1.5 or below, the artwork is scaled-down and appears ten times smaller on opening the PDF.

What happens when I Open the large-scaled artwork in a previous version of Illustrator?

• When you save or export the artwork created on a large-sized canvas in Illustrator version below 24.0, the artwork will appear ten times smaller so that it gets accommodated in the default canvas size. Note that it may also disable some editing features and change the text layout.

What are the Supported formats for export and limitations?

• Currently, the following formats are supported if you export a large-sized document: PDF, PNG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, and SVG.
• The Slices and Save for web features do not currently work with large-size canvas. If you are using Actions that involve these features, steps related to them will be skipped.

Check this link for more FAQs and known issues.

[Exuberant_outfit5DC7]

Something really incredible, being able to organize everything in a single work table.

Great

[Christian Bernal V]

Solo para aclarar, el tamaño máximo es: 227" o,  2270"

... llustrator 24.2 ofrece un tamaño de lienzo de 2270 x 2270 pulgadas que le perm....

[mike.theinsidetrackinc]

Big surprise, it doesn't work. I have this new version and when I tride to enlarge a graphic to 400" I got the usual answer that it didn't fit on the artboard. I don't know what Adobe is trying to say, but if you can't enlarge something larger than 227" then there has been no change in the artboard maximum size. If this is actually more like a CAD Tools workaround, then say so. That would be welcome. In fact, create a CAD Tools menu for it as well. Then you will have something to talk about. It won't be a "100x larger" artboard, but it will eventually be a helpful change to the current workflow of creating artwork at a fractional size of the production output.

MHBrown

[Om Nath Jha]

Hi Mike,

Would you mind sharing a little bit more about your workflow so that we can assist you further? What's the dimension of the artboard? I am able to create artwork that is larger than 227" without any error. 

Thanks,

Om

[GravityDesignWorks]

If you already have a document open, that is not created as a Large Canvas, you are not able to scale it beyond the 227" which is as he says much better than I will "is defeating the purpose"

[Smart Food Safe]

I do agree with you

[Disposition_Dev]

i mean, cool... but the real question is "why is this a limitation that exists at all?!"

illustrator handles vector artwork. there should be absolutely no reason to have a hard limit in any direction. it's just math. the math that defines a shape doesn't stop working if the dimensions become larger than 2700 inches.

This is a completely arbitrary limitation that has plagued customers since the beginning... and somehow it seems that the issue isn't clear and you've spent time and energy rebuilding something instead of destroying it all together.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

I completely agree that AI shouldn't have a size limit. All this feature is really doing is the 10x math in the background. You will notice that the size "increased" 10x (squared), but the zoom is reduced 10x. Not much different than the old method of doing the 10x math on ones own and scaling the printing upon output.

I see this feature in the same category as artboards, which I view as simply a "clipping path" page view of the original 227 squared size.

Don't get me wrong, I like both features, but I don't view them as radical new features--just clever workarounds.

[shawnt85889998]

This. I can't understand why there HAS to be a limit. Pretty sure that Affinity allows artboards to scale infinitely, and considering they are the new boys on the block, they've managed to figure it out without copius years of complaints and updates that don't address it. 

[Monika Gause]

Actually Affinity doesn't.

The biggest artboard you can set up is 21674,7 mm x 21674,7 mm, which is 71 x 71 feet.

[shawnt85889998]

Well, there you go. I have used it in the past when Illustrator was an issue, and Affinity was able to handle larger scales. That being said, I was not a huge fan of many of the tools and grouping features, delayed fadeouts etc... was bizarre. 

[Bobby Henderson]

Affinity Designer has maximum document sizes that vary based on the DPI resolution in the document's settings. The current version (1.8.3.641) has the following limits:
72 DPI: 3555.555" X 3555.555"

96 DPI: 2666.666" X 2666.666"
144 DPI: 1777.777" X 1777.777"
192 DPI: 1333.333" X 1333.333"
300 DPI: 853.333" X 853.333"
400 DPI: 640" X 640"

The maximum page sizes in Affinity are large enough for most kinds of large format design. No one needs to design a 14' X 48' billboard ad at 300dpi. That would be ridiculous. One of the big things I do NOT like about Affinity Designer is the application is dreadful at exporting artwork to other vector-based drawing programs or page layout programs. Affinity Designer may technically be a vector-based drawing application but its object fills behave in a raster-based manner. If you export artwork in SVG, PDF or EPS format (trying various odd-ball settings) the best results you can get when opening the files in a rival app like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW is vector-based shapes married to raster-based object fills, all contained in clipping masks for each object. 

[GravityDesignWorks]

How do we go about opening files created in the Beta Large Canvas 2.1 Build in the new "official" release of large canvas?  All my files scale down as if I was opening in an older version of AI.

[Monika Gause]

Please ask questions about beta versions in the prerelease forum.

[GravityDesignWorks]

This question is not about the Beta release, its about why the current release version will not open large canvas files from the beta.

[Monika Gause]

Since this is about beta files, it's about the beta.

Please ask in the beta forum.

[LuckyMuc]

Great!!  I wrote so many times since years to Adobe to add this in Illustrator!!! I drawed the first 18 meter advertisings and it works great! Thank you very much!!!

But I found a small bug in a for me very important feauture: The align tool dont work. In the last update 2 days ago is this bug not fixed.

This is only a example.. in the following case I use normaly the transform funktion. But in many cases its faster with the align tools and the even distribution.   

Please fix it soon 🙂

[Om Nath Jha]

Hi there,

This issue has been fixed in the latest update (24.2.1). Please check this link for more details.

Please note that after upgrading you might still see that 'Align To' sets itself to 'Align to Key Object'. If you see this, please manually set it to the required setting. The reason it might get set to 'Key Object' after the update is that Ai remembers your last 'Align To' setting on subsequent launches as well. 

Regards,

Om

[dhirajk18517133]

I am completely distraught with the AI crashes after this update. Any images that you place outside the artboard for reference just vanishes after recovery. Needless to say, the crashes itself is extremely frustrating. Please look into this issue immediately. 

[Monika Gause]

Please contact Customer Care. Only they can log into your computer to check things out. https://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html

[adept_creative]

I have always wondered why make the limitation in the first place.

[Monika Gause]

It's a 33 year old application.

There are some videos on youtube in which John Warnoch demoes the first version. The computer he sues is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE

It had 4 MB of RAM.

[Disposition_Dev]

While we do understand that the application is old.. And the hardware back then was limited. But the fact remains that in the many years since these initial restrictive conditions.. The problem persists. Users of this software, especially professionals, have been complaining of this issue for at least a decade (which is approx how long I've been using it) and the issue persists.

Ive written crummy software before.. And I know that limitations in ability and hardware are things that happen.. But when I write software for my company, and a previous limitation disappears... I update my software to work how I intended it to. I don't just let a past limitation dictate how my software must behave today.

The ability to remove the canvas size limitation exists. But the will does not. 😞

[Bobby Henderson]

Which vector-based drawing programs have an unlimited maximum canvas size? I'm not aware of any truly having that feature. CorelDRAW has a max canvas size of 1800" X 1800" and really gets into uncomfortable territory with pages over 1000" in width or height (zoom level warning boxes pop up frequently).

When Illustrator was based on Postscript tech the max canvas size was even smaller; the shift to PDF boosted the max canvas size to 227" X 227". The Illustrator development team has done a trick of sorts, moving a decimal point, to enable a max canvas size 10 times larger than the previous limit.