Justin, the point isn't how we can get around the issue.. the point is this needs to be added to illustrator.. Its a drawing layout program that needs to be updated from 1998. We all know there are tools to buy to "fix" the problem but they are all bandaids..
Modify Illustrator to work with larger art boards PERIOD!!.. NO OTHER OPTIONS ARE GOOD ENOUGH.

If you are needing to scale down because of the canvas limitation on a professional level (getting paid to design/layout) then I would recommend CadTools. It gives you another set measurement/sizing tools, effectively replacing the ones that come with Ai. You can set the scale within CadTools and it does all the 'Math' work for you, but really its like you are designing in 1:1. For my use, I make customer proofs on ledger sized paper 11x17 and use CadTool to design signs from a few inches to over 200'. Its industry standard to work with architect scale (ie 3/8" = 1') than Engr scale (ie 5:1); From city planners to contractors, to sign makers...

CadTools also lets you easily work with multiple scales on the same spread, for example, you have a building elevation shown at 1/16"=1' scale with a banner superimposed on it. But you want to get a close up of the banner so you can show it at a 1/2" = 1' scale so the customer can see the details. All this on one page.

So its really never Ai limiting my (and many others) ability to create 1:1 but the fact its designed to scale on a std size paper. Ledger size creates wonderful spreads on .PDFs or prints.

So even if Ai got unlimited canvas sizes, im pretty sure multiple industries would stick to designing to standard sizes proofs they want to make... Leave 1:1 to the software that directly talks to the machines that produce them (ie Flexi to plotter, Onyx to printer, EnRoute to router)

Don't be that guy that throws a random scaled drawing for someone to produce. Customers will appreciate the professionalism, and subcontractors will enjoy do work for you.

Gabby,
I am too terrible at math, but I've been working in 1/10th scale lately. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Just take the number in inches and move the decimal point over to the left one number, So if the size is 230" total, it would be 23.0" at 1/10 scale. 70' (840") would be 84.0"
Hope this helps!

I need to make an illustration at 70'. I am HORRIBLE at math and have no idea how I'm going to convert the specific measurements in this illustration and work with a scaled piece. We live in 2019, this isn't MS Paint. People are creating large signs, billboards, etc. It's time for Adobe to realize that their clients work on large scale projects and need the program to adapt.

Is all of Adobe's software engineering done outside the USA?

Ivan Sablaev (Sahba): It would seem obvious to anyone with an IQ of 100 that computer graphics is the way that in 21 century, visual communications are made, and that includes banners, billboards, even buildings and stripe malls. But, Adobe illustrator is limited to a page size of 577.955 cm (227.5”) square! Read more and you see idiotic solution suggestion from them such as “work in scale”!

Two things to consider:

When you save a file and it is available to everyone or sent to a production unit, if the operator just “prints” it without looking at the special instructions, the file would be fine at 1:1 scale. However, that is not the case with using a “scale” other than 1:1
When you work in scale, you have to make a lot of calculations up front to make sure how things are going to work and what scale you should use. Then you have to make sure you won’t get distracted by the smell of the pizza or the coffee and enter numbers in real size instead of scale. That can cause a lot of lost time.
These two simple issues would be very obvious to an average experienced designer or artist, but it is not apparently understood by Adobe ILL team (*see below).

So we are stuck with their software because due to the length of time and lack of availability, they are the standards in “visual communication” software.

Illustrator 2019:

CORE ENGINEERING: Aastha Gupta, Akhil Jindal, Amit Gaurav, Amit Jain, Amitesh Srivastava, Angad Kumar Gupta, Ankit Aggarwal, Anklt Phogat, Anklta Sana, Anmol Sud, AnuJa Gupta, Anukrltl BaJpal, Arusnl Jain, Arzoo Kashyap, Avadesh Khumar Sharma, Bhavna Saluja, Dlnesh Khandelwal, Dirk Schutze, Divyanshu Shende, Gaurav Pant, Gaurav Jain, Gaurav Jain, Harlsh Kumar, Jatln Sethi, Mansi Nagpal, Meenu Sinha, Mohan Sharma, Mridul Kavldayal, Nisha Garg, P. Ram Prasad, Pragatl Johrt, Prashant Kumar Singh, Prateek Soni, Praveen Kumar Dhanuka, Puneet Saini, Rajat Chaturvedi, Rajesh Budhiraja, Rajeev Kumar, Sanjay Kumar, Sanjeev Biswas, Sayan Ghosh, Shanmugh Natarajan, Shitesh Chourasia, Shivendra Agarwal, Shreya Mahapatra, Subhasis Bhattacharjee, Sumit Bansai, Tarun Berl, Tarun Garg, Tarun Gehlaut, Tarun Tandon, Tushita Aggarwal, Vaishall Aggarwal, Varun S. Nair, Vinay Pareek, Vineet

Batra, Vlvek Agrawal

CORE QUALITY ENGINEEIRNG: Andaleeb Fatima, Anlsh Kumar, Anjall, Ankit Goyal, Ashutosh

Chaturvedi, Ashutosh Gupta, E. Ramalingam, Govind Gupta, Harsh Tiwani, Hitesh Sharma,M ohd Ziaullah, Mohit Agarwal, Neha Jha, Nitish Agarwal, Pragya, Raghuveer Singh, Rishabh Tiwarl, Ritika Patel, Sarah Khan, Sandeep Nigam

COMMUNITY HELP AND LEARNING: Ashu Vashishtha, Plyush Bhatnagar, Chandra Shekhar Purl, Nandini Gupta, Pawan Nayar

CREATIVE CLOUD HOME EXPERIENCE: Dalla Ackner, Pranay Bhawsar, Tanya Braverman, Conor Buckley, Marcus Cavanaugh, Troy Church, Jonnson Cl Yu Fung, Amanda Dowd, Ainle Figueroa , Ari Fyman, Joe Galea, Nina Gholaml, Melisa Im, Atlsnay Jain, Abha Kapoor, Shahbaz Khan, Dharmendra Kumar, Likwal Laurence Lal, Natalle Leuenberger, Leslie Lewis, Neeta Nadkarny, Randy Nielsen, Kim Ortiz, Jackson Palmer, Haresh Parekh, Michael Perry, Jakub Plichta, Ragnuveer Pullakandam, Nikaash Purl, Supriya Rao, Sarah Smart, Dave Stein, Emily Uy, Raman Walla, James Wllllamson, Mike C. Yang, Stephan Yhann, Tony Zhao

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Anubhav Rohatgl, Neeraj Nandkeolyar, Sunny Ladkani, Varun Sharma, Vlnay Pahlajani, Yogesh Sharma

PRODUCT MARKETING & EVANGELISM : Wayne Hoang, Rutus Deuchler, Takasnl Iwamoto, Terry White, Paul Trani, Mike Chambers

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT: Kallol Acharya, Adltya Kant, Sandeep Grover

EXPERIENCE DESIGN, USER RESEARCH: Rakesh Baldya, Deepanjana Chakravarty, Troy Church, Vlnay Dixlt, Amanda Dowd, Ainle Figueroa, Shashi Mangu, Samrat Nawle, Latika Neetakantan, Sreedhar Ranganathan, Hinnerk Schmidt do Rego Silva, Eric Snowden, Emily Uy, Tanlya Vij, Mallika Yelandur

ADOBE RESEARCH: Paul Asente, Stephen Schiller, Will Li, Mathew Fischer, Danny Kaufman,

Kevin Wampler

APP USAGE: Ajay Bansal, Anuj Mittal, Neeraj Kakoty, Archl Gupta, Avikant Gupta, Saloni Goyal, Ayush Gupta, Anklt Kumar Singh, Abhimanyu Chopra

TECHNICAL SERVICES : Aman Kumar, Avanlsh Dlvya, Hlmanshu Kapoor, David Metzger, Gaurav Prince, Scott Worthington, Sumlt Singh, Madison Murphy Leupp , Wren Sauer, Om Nath Jha, Srishti Ball, Norihtro Nakamura, Takashl Iwamoto, Gaganpreet Singh Bhamrah, Anu Pant, Nikhil Gupta, Ashlsh Bijalwan

I design stadium wraps for sporting events, I create things that are 300 + feet long. (3600 inches) Now I can understand if that may be too much to ask, but right now I am limited to 227 inches that's not even 20 ft. can we not bring that limit up to lets say 400 inches so we can design a 30 ft piece at a time. I realize this is vector, However I sometimes need a piece at 100% scale and I am limited once again in Illustrator to less then 20 feet

Adobe Please start using real professional to Beta test your ish. Your trying to be to cleaver and it makes things harder. And get to big a head about your current market position. Quark made that mistake and you guys took over. Get back to good product design and stop worrying about squeezing every dollar out of your consumers. If you products hold up we will be loyal. (your current suite is full of really annoying bugs)

It seems now that Illustrator's multiple artboard functions are creating the problem of truly becoming a 1:1 drawing tool.

The artboards themselves are acting like "viewports" or "pages" that must all fit within a limited physical space.

That's creating a new "feature" to fix one set of problems and at the same time creating an entirely new set of problems for a different subset of users.

Multiple artboards are essentially blurring the lines between Illustrator and InDesign.
Make up your mind, Adobe.

Is Illustrator a multi-page layout program, or is InDesign a multi-page layout program?

If people are using hundreds of "artboards" just to use Illustrator's automated exporting capabilities, then why also have a palette that's called Asset Export?!

For all those people tediously laying out hundreds of drawings on separate artboards, simply creating an Asset that's ready for export at multiple scales / resolutions eliminates most situations' need for multiple artboards in the first place.

Adobe needs to decide which problems to address with which tools, streamline each tool in the CC toolset to do what it does best and not overlap partially with other tools in the set. Cleansing and purifying each tool of its feature-bloat would make them more powerful, not less.

Otherwise, you have tons of users who only license / use one tool for multiple uses for which it is not the most ideal / powerful application (long-reading text in Photoshop, book layouts on 40 artboards in Illustrator, etc.).

Why can Illustrator not simply be a 1:1 drawing application?
When you create a file in, say, AutoCAD, you always draw everything at full scale.

When you need to generate an exported file at a specific size (like an 11" x 17" PDF), you create views of that drawing that are at a specific scale.

For most people, they would never need to create scaled views to export!
Most people start a drawing that will be used at the same size at which it's created to fit on standard paper sizes.

But for those who do need it, that ability is critical.
I only design EGD (experiential / environmental graphics) at the scale of architecture.
Illustrator's dimension limits are a constant pain for this entire sector of the design industry.

I want to be able to design a report cover in an AI file that's US Letter size 1:1, and at the same time, create an urban plan layout diagram for the City of Chicago that's 1:1 at 10 miles wide by 10 miles high.

Why is my design software forcing me to create the urban plan at a scale without giving me the built-in tools to do so easily without buying expensive and complicated / buggy 3rd-party plug-ins to do it?

Anon, You probably want to clear any guides that extend to the canvas limit or hidden objects grouped into what you're scaling.

Objects falling off the drawing area is a real pain with Illustrators archaic canvas limitations

I am currently trying to scale something that is 170" total width and it won't let me because it will make objects fall off the drawing area...f**cking seriously? And it is in the center of the canvas. Oh but when I copy it and paste it into a new document it works fine. Sweet.

I'm creating exhibition artwork and am coming up against the limit of 5779mm wide. I need 5855mm. this is rather an annoying issue.

RE: Remove canvas size limit
I second this, hard. Sometimes in the same doc I need to have 20 or 30 different artboard options to be able to export and because of what I do, some of the artboards end up being 4x larger than the majority of them on the canvas, so I frequently run out of room in doing this.

Something to consider: Those of us working in or around the printing field (depending on the printer) may be working with Press Quality PDFs. The max PDF size is currently 200". That limit would also need to be removed, or we'd have to scale artwork down anyway, and scale it back up at the RIP. I think there just may not be an easy fix for this and maintain a decent level of inter-app compatibility. As far as a virtual scale is concerned, I'd totally love to see a decent in-app feature added that adequately replaces a 3rd party plugin like CADtools for scale and dimensioning.

Yogesh_ not sure if you are still working on this, but my answer to your question would be "Yes...if" the if is related to the ability of the recipient printer to return it to its correct scale. The banner printer to whom I am sending art can only print if the art is scaled at 100%. I deliver the art as a PDF and their operator cannot accurately rescale an undersize piece of art. Maybe some work with printer's interfaces is needed.

In my case I am trying to create files that print at 16' x 97' The printer breaks it into strips 4' or 8' wide then mounts it billboard style. Thanks for considering this important feature.

Yogesh,

'Would it help if there was a "virtual scale"?'

Come on! This is a disingenuous question, no doubt. You must must must know that any of us working in the 'built' world (i.e. with architects) are working at scale, AND that we use HotDOOR CADTools (with more or less success) or some other 3rd party plug-in that allows us to do what we need to do. Adobe must have been considering (and working on?) 'at-scale' tools and, for reasons unknown to us users, chosen not to push this process.

When you ask this kind of coy question, you alienate your subscribers. And then we feel like prisoners of a product relationship, rather than willing members of your 'community'.

A little honesty would be lovely here...

(yes, I see that yours is an ancient post, but the feedback continues to be valid...)

+1

Encountering this issue more often in designing for larger surfaces like wall murals. Scaling is fine I guess, not ideal.

+1

The only reason I can think that this hasn't already been fixed is that there is some fundamental problem with the way Illustrator stores information. Maybe they didn't allow enough bits per dimension and can't fix it without starting over.

I'm 100% on board with removing the artboard size cap. Get rid of it!

I also pay for this product and use it at work.