Removing canvas size limit is something that I've been hoping for and, quite frankly, expecting for a very long time. Illustrator is my go to for almost everything and it's what we used at work every day for over a decade. My bosses decided that it was time to stop building things at scale because it was starting to cause problems for production and fabrication. They wanted to use software that allows graphics to be built at 1:1 regardless of required size so we stopped using Illustrator because that limitation has always been there. I work for a sign company, building graphics that are much larger than the 227" square limitation that Illustrator has always had, especially when we're using elevation drawings to check fit and confirm survey measurements. Those things must be done full size. Vehicle graphics, specifically those for tractor trailers or aircraft should be built 1:1 to make sure that they people producing the graphics after I build them don't have to worry about whether they're the finished size or not.

I would prefer to use Illustrator for all the work I do but I have to use what the company mandates. It's not Illustrator anymore because of this limitation. Another is dimensioning tools. Illustrator has none, or at least, it didn't have any. The only way to get any sort of dimensioning tools was to buy a third party plug-in.

For my workflow, there can be no virtual scale option. I need to be able to build anything required at 1:1 scale. CorelDraw (which I am not a fan of at all btw) has had an unlimited canvas since I used it in college in the late 90's. We now use FlexiSign (again, not a huge fan) which also has an unlimited canvas but is rather clunky and sometimes difficult to work with. It allows us to build 1:1 and has decent dimensioning tools which we use for every project we do, large or small. Honestly, I figured that this is something that would have been addressed long ago and it's the number one issue that I've had with Illustrator since I started in the sign industry. For my personal use at home, I use Illustrator but this limitation is still a problem. Anything larger than 19 feet cannot be built at full size. I work larger than that daily.

On a side note, alignment tools for artboards would be a welcome feature as well.

Our company creates live event graphics and animations. With the technical advances of LED panels in the last few years, we're now creating massive visuals for arenas and large venues. These are typically made up of several artboards which can't be aligned horizontally, given the current canvas size limitations. And working scaled is just a headache as we jump between Illustrator, After Effects, Cinema 4D and other programs.

As an example, Illustrator's canvas is 16,000-something pixels wide. My current project is 25,000 pixels wide. I can jigsaw the artboards together, stacking them, but that prevents me from creating a single graphic, say a line, that spans from one artboard to another.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

********, @Spike et al

We tried to increase the canvas size earlier this year, but we hit technical limitations. So we are back to the drawing board exploring other solutions.

From what we understand, canvas size limitation impacts two workflows:

1. Multiple artboards that, together, require larger area than current canvas.
One way to solve this could be to have multiple canvases in one file with a seamless experience.

2. Single artboard but bigger than the current canvas.
This a tricky one. And that's why I asked whether it would help if you could specify a virtual scale for your document, say 1:10, and *********** starts accepting bigger dimensions. It's like *********** takes care of the calculations for you. You would be able to specify "50 ft" for dimensions. When you view your art at 100%, it would be similar to 10x zoom had you been drawing without the virtual scale of 1:10. Does that make sense?

I am going to keep this thread in "Needs More Info" for a while so others can add more info.

Thanks,
******

@Yogesh - this is excellent news. Additional artboards will really help with our workflow.

We don't typically have individual artboards that would exceed the size of the canvas. However, it's a huge pain to hit the limits of the canvas when I'm only adding 5 or 6 new artboards.

Example:

I'm working on a screen layout, so I've opened a doc with one artboard. I finalize the layout and want to add new artboards to create variations on the original.

I hit the "New Artboard" icon in the Artboards palette.

After adding 5 or 6, I get the message "Cannot create Artboard outside the canvas. Please rearrange and try again."

I have to "Rearrange Artboards", add more artboards, then rearrange again.

Thanks,
Richard

I work on vehicle graphics and trade show graphics, and prefer to do all artwork at actual size. It is a huge waste of time scaling and figuring out resolution and line weights for scaled down art. Broad side of a box truck exceeds the pasteboard, workflow stops to figure out how to paste an element, or you scale and start from scratch.

In the upcoming release of Illustrator we have enabled up to 1000 artboards in an Ai document. But we will be tracking this request for increased Canvas size.

It will help if you can tell us about your workflow while you vote on this bug. Also would it help if there was a "virtual scale"? Say, if you could define a scale of 1:10 so that input fields accept bigger values, and exported files are at scaled size (10x in this case)?

Thanks,
******

Not sure that infinite artboards solves anything; sounds risky from a project management and workflow perspective to chuck every thing in one Illustrator file, but a canvas at least twice the current size would be a significant. Thanks.

This is great!

How many artboards will we be able to have in one AI file?

When would this new feature/upcoming release of Illustrator happen?

We have worked out for solving Artboards limit problem in upcoming release.

We use Illustrator for icon creation, so that we can export to PNG and SVG. Across a large organization with hundreds of products, we have thousands of icons. We also use Illustrator for UI design, and can easily run out of artboards for complex flows.

The 100-artboard limit is a huge pain, and is causing us to look at more flexible products, like Sketch.

Please remove all size limitations for the illustrator drawing area, and illustrators ability to save to PDF. This can be a huge pain when multiple people are working on the same large format files.