[Catfish]

Illustrator's workspace includes a page, presumably indicating the area you ought to be drawing within. However, the workspace extends a long, long way beyond the page, meaning that if you click left or right on the scrollbars, you jump off the page completely, out in the realm of blank workspace. Usually your only way back is to zoom out to about 10%, at which point you find the page area & can zoom back in.

Is this really the way things are supposed to work, or am I missing something?

[sfr]

Well, I use Freehand (and very rarely nowadays), but that's the way it works in Freehand too. The extra space is practical for keeping stuff you might not want on the actual page

Saffron

[Ian Jones]

In Illustrator you can press ctrl + 0 (as in Zero), to get 'fit to window'. That'll get you back on track if you get lost.

There is a limit to that extra space with adobe products. However in CorelDraw the space is unlimited, as long as you keep using it it keeps extending until you run out of hard-drive space!

[Derek]

That's how Illustrator works... since it's a vector based program, it gives you infinite (almost) space outside of your printable area to scale, create, size, move, store, you name it, any elements you may have or need for your piece.
Um, I mean, no it shouldn't work like that... you have many problems. I'm not giving you answers, so nyah!

By the way, what version are you using? Some versions of Illustrator have 'issues' with curve smoothing, presenting some shapes. Because of this, you may not want to test the extremes of the program... or... if you have the processor and power, you may want to crank your work up in size to see what you can do with it all.

[ May 26, 2002: Message edited by: Derek Smith ]