I moved to CorelDraw years ago because I could design a 12' x 48' billboard without scaling. Why not just make the canvas a real-world size? It doesn't have to be infinite. Even large exterior signage for the sides of buildings wouldn't be much larger than 200 ft. Just make the canvas 250 ft x 250 ft. Done.

I agree this is necessary. I often deal with Large exterior signage, sometimes 60-100 feet wide, and scaling is fine but becomes a hassle. We end up having to use proprietary sign software just because it can go larger (Flexi Sign) Please Adobe fix this

Wow - surprised to seem my old forum post got linked here. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1003569

Good to see others are still trying to get this fixed....

Awesome to hear this is on the road map. I've seen a number of production errors due to this limitation in Illustrator.

Bless you Anna

Good news! I messaged Adobe through Social Media with a link to this thread. I also mentioned how some users are migrating to Affinity Designer. In response, Adobe staff wrote:

"Hi Anna,

Just got a confirmation from the product engineering team that the feature is under consideration and should be implemented in future. "

I'll still be migrating to Affinity Designer, but I hope this is positive news for other users!

Please make it unlimited. I work with banners and billboards that are 20+ feet wide and it's a nightmare every time when trying to scale the graphics down for the printer, i need 100% size!!!

PLEASE!!!

Unlimited canvas size is a must for outdoor Sign companies like the one i work for. Even CorelDraw has had this feature for ever!!! They make fun of me cause i keep a PC side by side with my mac and use CorelDraw for a lot of what i design because Illustrator just wont make the cut ...or it does, in this case. Cuts my artwork if it falls off the canvas... nice? Not...

@anita denig: I had a similar issue recently, just had to do everything at 1:100 scale. Whoever is printing it should be able to take it from there. If that's not an option you could look at Affinity Designer – never used it myself, but lots of people swear by it and from what I understand their canvas is less limited..?

Hey everyone , I'm in over my head i have to create an artwork for where i work and it needs to be 15metres long 1.2 high and has a massive dan chain down the centre and heaps of text

im pulling my hair out please

can we please have the canvas size bigger

or should i not be making this in illustartor

i guess the limitation is on floating point accuracy. if you made an option to adjust this it would mean we could have as big a workspace as we want, just with a small compromise on point accuracy.

Was just testing the canvas limits of Affinity Designer this morning. Affinity Designer canvas size limits are around 2,500 inches each axis (width / height) - about 10x the size of current Illustrator limits.

It also allows zoom levels up to nearly 100,000%.

Does anyone know if Affinity Designer has a size limit? Can't find anything online, but might be worth checking out if it doesn't. It's cheap and seems pretty full-featured, and it's not a billion years old like Corel

I must agree. Increasing the canvas size limit would be of great help and improvement for a lot of reasons which I'm sure 135 comments have already covered.

To everyone who wants an unlimited canvas - try out "Affinity Designer". It's a vector program with a one time payment. A free trial is available. Hopefully it'll resolve my workflow issue.

I create many large-size (220" and longer) wall graphics for stickers that get made for me at a local sign shop. The saved .ai file saves okay, but the preview shows that it is cut off on the right-hand side and that is the way the emailed file opens on the sign printer's computer. Can't even save it as a PDF because it declares, "The dimension of this page are out of range." The size of the Illustrator document should be limitless as well as the ability to save/create a PDF that many printers prefer.

+1000 - this would be the biggest possible improvement to Illustrator I could imagine.

Here are my two use cases:

1. Designing signs. For example, channel letters to be installed on a building, or a huge banner. Because AI limits the size I constantly have to calculate values myself. Virtual scale would be somewhat helpful but would NOT fix the problem - when making this type of sign you have to output a full-size pattern for the metalworker and the neon maker. So not being able to print a full-size, full-scale pattern would be a failure. I have to use expensive alternatives like FlexiSign because of this.

2. Designing websites. I prefer AI because most of my work is vector as opposed to raster. Having multiple artboards has made this so much better because I can design many of the pages in a single file and have everything at my fingertips. But for big websites, it's not possible to cram all the layouts into AI because of its silly limit. Let it expand limitlessly! I understand at a certain point working memory could become a problem, but again since this is vector and not raster, that wouldn't be an issue with most of my designs.

On behalf of Environmental Graphic Designers everywhere....increase the canvas!!!

100 % agree the canvas size not going bigger is frustrating and I depend on other softwares such as ****** omega and and sign lab that offer this in their package. How does the market leader Adobe not offer the same service.