Large dynamic text breaks after 1000 chars approx.

[DannyNN]

I'm creating dynamic text from text boxes in Illustrator.

When the text is larger than approx. 1000 characters, the content of the text variable gets broken and when re-applied, it breaks the text.

It can be clearly seen when exported to XML, as it displays some odd characters before the end of the variable, which is NOT the real end of the text. (code snippet added below)

<v:sampleDataSet dataSetName="Data Set 1">
<Variable1>
<p>Hola Mundo.</p>
<p>1234567890</p>

[...]

<p>1234567890</p>
<p>Hola Mundo.</p>
<p>抽΅⤣</p>
</Variable1>
</v:sampleDataSet>

Strangely enough, if I manually edit the XML to add more content to that variable, it imports and applies well.

I looked around to see if the variablekind.TEXTUAL or the Dataset item had any specific character limit with no luck.

Any help will be appreciated.

[Silly-V]

If it imports and works after manual edit, there's probably not a limit but some issue with Illustrator's exporting of your document's text. I've never seen this before but there's probably some character combination that is processed in a way that changes your text art into the weird characters.

[DannyNN]

I agree it might be an export issue rather than limit in general, but it's
definitely not tied to the content.

I was able to reproduce it with 3 different actual files (can't share them
since those are client related content) and later reproduced it in a blank
document adding test text.

It's worth mentioning that the characters showing when it gets trimmed are
always the same, and the trimming was the exact same of characters in the
client's file (1306 characters, including the formatting tabs of the XML as
well as the opening and closing

tags).

The only thing that leads me to think it's an actual limit (or bug) is that
I'm able to "break" it without even exporting the XML file.
- Create text box
- Add text (add over 1500 characters, you could have it previously typed in
a text editor)
- Create a variable and make that text box dynamic text
- Create a data set
- Edit the text box (add one character)
- Attempt to re-populate the text box with the data from the data set
- You can see the text gets corrupted towards the end of the text box

I know Illustrator is not meant to be used with large text (that's what
InDesign is made for), but when I get content created by clients and need
to work on that, it becomes an issue, forcing me to go with workarounds 😞

Thanks!
Dan

[CarlosCanto · Accepted solution]

interesting, when you add more characters manually it imports ok, but you can't save a new dataset, so agree with you, there must be a limit.

I found it was 1020 characters. 2504 for the whole file including xml tags, variable and dataset names.