Maximum artboard size

[Sparkyj]

Can someone please tell me the maximum artboard size that can be set in Affinity Designer?

How many inches wide/tall can you make an artboard?

I need to know before purchasing and can not find this information anywhere. Thank-you

Edited May 25, 2020 by Sparkyj

[firstdefence]

I think you’ll find it has no limit other than for that imposed by hardware but to give an idea I found this quote on a post that was complaining about illustrators artboard limits.

Quote

• I've been doing print design for a loooong time, mostly in the past using Adobe products, and have neverhad trouble with designing to a specified scale and having it printed correctly. That said, I can tell you I just created an artboard in Affinity Designer that was 22.5 ft by 15 feet as a test (had to enter in inches values) and it saved and worked without trouble. – GerardFalla Oct 8 '19 at 20:09 

 

[GarryP]

In addition to the answer above, I’ve just tried to create a very large document in Designer and the largest size I could get the software to accept in the New Document dialog is 21.675 metres square at 300DPI. Taking the DPI down to 72DPI – for very large documents you probably wouldn’t need a DPI of greater than this – you can create a document of 90.311 metres square. That should probably be big enough for most requirements.
On top of this you can, once the document has been created, extend the size of the artboard (I’ve taken it to 1 kilometre as a quick test, see attached image) but I have no idea how well the software will work with documents of this sort of size as the zoom level will need to be down to, effectively, zero to see it all.

[firstdefence]

Just read a reply from Meb circa 2018: The max document size allowed is 256.000 x 256.000 pixels (for UK 256,000 x 256,000 pixels.)

I think we really need an FAQ on this.

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Just read a reply from Meb circa 2018: The max document size allowed is 256.000 x 256.000 pixels (for UK 256,000 x 256,000 pixels.)

I think we really need an FAQ on this.

FWIW, I initially created this Jumbo canvas.afdesign document with a non-artboard canvas size of 256,000 x 256,000 px, the maximum the new document dialog would accept. I then created a 300,000 x 256,000 px cyan rectangle, an ellipse, & three > 256,000 length lines, all with 2000 px strokes. After saving & closing it on my Mac, as expected Quick Look & Finder's Get Info window showed it truncated to 256,000 x 256,000 px.

However, I then reopened it, selected the rectangle (still 300,000 x 256,000 px), & using the Artboard Tool's Size: Selection option I ended up with the artboard as in the attached file. Its size is 302,000 x 258,000 px. After resaving it, Quick Look & Finder's Get Info window now show the full, non-truncated version.

[firstdefence]

23 minutes ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, I initially created this Jumbo canvas.afdesign document with a non-artboard canvas size of 256,000 x 256,000 px, the maximum the new document dialog would accept. I then created a 300,000 x 256,000 px cyan rectangle, an ellipse, & three > 256,000 length lines, all with 2000 px strokes. After saving & closing it on my Mac, as expected Quick Look & Finder's Get Info window showed it truncated to 256,000 x 256,000 px.

However, I then reopened it, selected the rectangle (still 300,000 x 256,000 px), & using the Artboard Tool's Size: Selection option I ended up with the artboard as in the attached file. Its size is 302,000 x 258,000 px. After resaving it, Quick Look & Finder's Get Info window now show the full, non-truncated version.

Interesting, one also has to consider the limits of files type being exported to such as PDF etc.

[Patrick Connor]

Technically I believe we allow up to 256000 pixels in each dimension Width and Height (so for a vector document watch out for the DPI taking your physical dimensions over that limit). I really would NOT recommend making one though it would be 64 giga-pixels and might be ...... slow to perform some functions.

[R C-R]

12 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Technically I believe we allow up to 256000 pixels in each dimension Width and Height (so for a vector document watch out for the DPI taking your physical dimensions over that limit). I really would NOT recommend making one though it would be 64 giga-pixels and might be ...... slow to perform some functions.

Since it includes only a few vector objects, the 'jumbo' file I attached to my previous post is only 60KB on disk, & I detected no sluggishness when using it. I would not expect that to hold true if it included any Pixel layers unless maybe they were tiny compared to the document canvas or artboard size!

Mostly, I just found it interesting that I could work around the limitation by using the Artboard Tool's option to create an Artboard the same size as a selected object that exceeded the 256K px limit.