Maximum page size for saving a PDF from Illustrator

By Chris Breier
The maximum page size for saving a PDF from Illustrator is 200 inches. The maximum artboard size is 227 inches, which means that documents can be created in Illustrator that can't be saved as PDF's. If you try to save a file that is greater than 200 inches in either direction as a PDF, you will be greeted with the following error message:

This should be fixed so that the maximum PDF size is the same as the maximum page size. The best workaround for this problem is to scale your artwork to a smaller size and then save it as a PDF.

SCALE ARTWORK DOWN AND THEN SAVE AS PDF

1. Select all and then double click on the scale tool.
2. Uniformly scale it to a percentage, in this case I chose 25%. Make sure "Scale Strokes & Effects" is checked, or else your stroke widths won't be scaled.
3.  Save as PDF.

You can scale it back to it's original size by scaling it by 400%. (400% of 25% = 100%). I saved it as a separate file because I didn't want to alter the original full sized artwork. It's important to proofread the resulting PDF to make sure that the artwork scaled properly and that nothing was altered. 

Alternate solution:

Import into InDesign, scale it down, then export as PDF

I liked this idea because InDesign would scale the entire image as an object without the possibility of making mistakes- like not scaling the strokes. The problem was that the right side of image was mysteriously cropped when I placed it in InDesign but I fixed this by saving the Illustrator file as an EPS before importing it into InDesign. This worked but the quality of the wasn't as good as the one made by Illustrator. There were fine white gaps in the image and it looked like the image was sliced into rectangular pieces.