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Artboards & Content are displaced after saving and opening a file

After saving & opening a file with multiple art boards, many of the artboards and/or their content is shifted around the canvas. I already tried all kinds things, even creating a new file and copying everything over. The bug happens again and again – and it's unpredictable, sometimes it's just one element, sometimes it's half of all the content.

Working with Version 29.8.1, the file is in large format mode, Mac OS 25 (latest). Not saving on a cloud synced folder.

When saving the same file into Adobe Cloud, the bug doesn't seem to occur... at least for the last few times I tried. But actually I don't want to save them there.

Also, when saving onto hard drive, sometimes a dialog appears that the file was changed outside of Illustrator (which is not true).

See attached file (blurred): the grey boxes on top come from the artboard on the bottom and the red ones from the artboards below.

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Robert shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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Started  ·  AdminAkshaya Saxena (Admin, Adobe Illustrator) responded  · 

We have been able to see this issue at our end. Thanks Dan Mason for the observations. It helped narrowing this down. We are working on fixing this quickly.

The issue happens for us after setting ruler's origin to one of the artboard's starting edge.

If anyone has any other observations or scenarios, do share.

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  • chris carr commented  ·   ·  Report

    After closing Illustrator file and reopening art work has moved. Illustrator is not fit for purpose!

  • chris carr commented  ·   ·  Report

    After closing Illustrator file and reopening art work has moved. Illustrator is not fit for purpose!

  • Dan Mason commented  ·   ·  Report

    Thinking about this some more, and as the issue has continued to happen for me, I think it might be to do with resetting the document's 0x0y position using the document rulers. When I create multiple artboards in a document, I reset the rulers' 0x0y positions to my active artboard by double-clicking in the top left of the rulers strip around the edge of my artwork area. The reason I think this may be the triggering action is that the distance and direction of the displacement of objects varies from document to document. This checks out as I often create many copies of an artboard to experiment with layouts and variations, then delete the unused/rejected designs leaving only the artboard that's approved, wherein I reset the rulers to zero in that artboard.

  • Dan Mason commented  ·   ·  Report

    I'm creating graphics using documents with multiple artboards containing a mixture of vector graphics, images, point type and area type. All looks correct upon saving and closing. When the file is reopened the contents of all area type objects have moved out of their text boxes. Everything moves by the same distance across the work area (and sometimes out of the boundary of the work area altogether). It only affects area type boxes, point type and all other objects not affected. A small adjustment to the size of the area type box causes the type to snap back into the box.

    Mac OS Sonoma 14.6, Adobe Illustrator 29.8.2.

  • Federico Estrada commented  ·   ·  Report

    After last update (29.8.2) text is now appearing outside of the text boxes and other elements move outside the artboard bounds after reopening files.

  • S. Gail Highhat commented  ·   ·  Report

    The same problem just happened to me, after packaging the file. I closed it for a few minutes, then opened it to make a PDF and it was all wrong.

    I can't share my client's files, but my screen looks just like others I've seen posted: all text is shifted up and to the right, while the actual text boxes are in the original, correct positions.

    I'm on Mac OS 14.6, Illustrator v29.8.1.

    UPDATE: Thanks to a suggestion in an Adobe Community thread, I was able to "fix" the problem by resizing each text box slightly until the words popped back into place, then immediately saved a PDF to lock in the edits.

    UPDATE 2: Today, the issue mutated to affect vector patterns with clipping masks...but not all of them. Some patterns shifted out of view but were still contained in the clipping masks, which didn't move. Others were fine. And all of the text shifted like before, but this time, up and to the left.

    Resizing the enclosing boxes worked for text, but not for the patterns.

  • F J (CrowTRobot85) commented  ·   ·  Report

    also have the same problem, with linked files as well. They are cut off or shifted around. I can also tell that theres a problem because the file size is drastically different then what they normally come out to.

  • Robert commented  ·   ·  Report

    I've sent a file by email, thanks.

  • Nichola Dos Santos commented  ·   ·  Report

    I have been having the same problem all week, its ok with old files but anything new I create with multiple artboards when I close and reopen some but not all arwork has shifted down and left, some ends up on top of the artwork that hasnt shifted. If you space bar the file and preview it it looks fine, its only when you open does it all move. Please help!

  • Priscila Gonzaga commented  ·   ·  Report

    I also had the same problem, I just had to re-do the file because I was in such a hurry. I thought it had to do with the fact that I used a lot of repeat objects to create patterns, but after seeing the other postings, I'm discarding this thought. Also, some of the texts frames looked like they were doubled, with an invisible pair of the same size. I use dropbox, but by chance this file was saved in the downloads folder, so it wasn't a cloud problem in my case.

  • AdminEgor Chistyakov (Admin, Adobe Illustrator) commented  ·   ·  Report

    A very similar problem happened to a document that worked just fin before — a part of the document jumped up and right. Some of the shifted elements were children in groups that stayed in place. The shift amount was integer values, but I didn’t figure out what it was in relation to the layout.
    I was not using the large canvas though, and this happened after a crash. What’s even more odd, that this bug also cursed previous versions of the same document (managed wuth Dropbox).

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