The work around mentioned before is a great idea, but there is one problem, the "art board navigator" docked at the bottom left hand corner of the entire app. Each number is place based on the prior setting (or original numbering of the art board), and no matter how much time you change the arrangement, art board 1 will be display in the "art board navigator" as 1. Unfortunately

steve fairbairn wrote:

 

I have never dared to ask until now (after a few beers :-)), but what is the point of multiple artboards? If you use 1 artboard and have it big enough, with page tiling set as you want it, can you do something with multiple artboards that you couldn't do before? Are multiple artboards really necessary? What do you gain by them? They don't even seem to have independent X/Y axes, so you can't use Cmd-F to paste in place between artboards. Isn't this just a sort of Freehand thingummy that hasn't been properly implemented in Illy?

It is not fully implemented but there is a feature request to be able to name the artboards for instance, tiling was something that most users that came to the forum did not understand and we continually had to explain it to them and many still could not get it to properly work, there was no bleed for tiled pages, you could not print a specific tile as you can with artboards, you could not print a specific range or place a specific tile in say ID there are lots of advantages already implemented, besides multiple size artboards which only happened in tiling is the page size was odd and did not divide accordingly.

There may be some features that would be nice to have but keep in mind artboards are not pages, to think of them as pages is not quite the right approach although there will eventually be a feature I assume to make artboard pages if one desired but that would mean all artboards would be restricted to the same size, unless of course Adobe does something really innovated and allow you to have custom page inserts.

Artboards are a bit like FreeHand but not the same by any means and it has come along way from CS3 and hopefully the same will happen in CS5.

I agree with James on the notion of insulting FreeHand users over this issue it is out of place and it is a very excellent feature and much needed for many users though perhaps not for all users.

Just make the numbers on the top left corner editable so one can renumber the artboards as s/he pleases. Simple and straightforward solution that should be a no brainer to code. Is it really necessary to wait for a new version of Illustrator to have this fixed? Should be implemented through an update asap.

I don't see why it is so hard to admit that, despite Freehand having been abandoned quite a long time before Adobe decided to terminate it, it had pretty intuitive features that Adobe should simply stick to copy. By the way, give me back paste inside while you're at it.

Absolutely, I underline every single word you wrote!

Multi Page from Hot Door has a very good plug-in for creating multiple pages in Illustrator versions before CS4. They cleverly used layers to accomplish this.

Now they have a new version, upgraded to AI CS4, but no mention if they use artboards instead of layers! I was hoping they would change the basis of Multi Page operation, but I guess they haven't yet. If they did, then I would hazard a guess that they had found a way to renumber artboards.

Last time I looked they were still in business selling Multipage and CADtools.

Yeah, hard to follow the thread sometimes. Thanks.

There's a nice Ruby script that makes renumbering artboards a breeze. You will just need to install Ruby, download the relevant ruby script, and then type in the terminal window "Ruby "renumber artboards.rb" "

http://thejoyofappscript.com/2009/12/illustrator-renumber-artboards/

This is an old thread CS5 was n it available at that time so it was not so easy peas!