Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 9/1/2008

Question
Hello, Is there a site which states Illustrator's limitations? I have a 22Mb CS3 Illy file with 1000's of lines that says it exceeds the limitations for producing a tiff. The same file also exceeds the limitations for printing a postscript file. I m afraid that when I finish my project I will not be able to print it. I have 2X3 Ghz Quad Core Intel Mac with 16 Gb ram.

So far Adobe has said to split the file which may be possible but not practical.

Thanks in adavance.


Answer
Hi Jason,

There really isnt a limitation site for Illustrator. But 99% of AI's "limits" are due to memory. If you really have 16 gigs of ram, you may just need to make sure most of if is available for  Illustrator. Exporting a file with a lot of paths does take a lot of memory especially if you are going hi-res and the size is large. What you can do is open your Activity Monitor (under the utilities folder) and see how much AI requires when you start to export. If it exceeds the available memory, then close all other apps and see how it goes. Otherwise, I would try to open this in Photoshop and save it out from there if you need a tiff file. Personally I would save as a pdf for printing, using the press quality settings.

Kevin