During class exercises today, we discovered that you can’t just use the maximum paper size for all cases. If you try to print raster data on the 48×36-inch paper size, the results are (sometimes?) so big the software discards the raster data. There’s no error message or long delay, it just throws away your data. You can then go crazy trying to figure out what’s wrong with your CorelDraw (or whatever program) file.

Since extremely large raster jobs are impractical anyway (because they take too long to run), this is not a severe limitation. It just means you need to choose a reasonable paper size when you’re doing a raster (or raster-then-vector) job. Most raster jobs will probably fit on the default Letter size paper, as long as your drawing is kept within the page margins.

I didn’t search for the precise limit on paper size for raster data. It might depend on the file contents and on the way the drawing program formats the data. Just be aware that there’s a limit.