: Illustrator internal precision? What is the internal precision used by Adobe Illustrator? Or put another way, what internal representation does Illustrator use to store coordinate data? Try this

@Gail6891361

No computer application has infinite precision. Even CAD applications do not have much larger accuracy scale. They do however allow you to change the working unit, which changes your zero point location, whereas illustrator allways calculates everything in points. You should probably want to read what every computer scientist needs to know about floating point numbers, which by now applies to every computer users.

Theres nothing wrong in drawing at scale, that is essentially what the CAD applications do they only have a facility to tell the user this fact. See the application internally only stores numbers interpretation of those numbers is up to the frontend.

Anyway I can not replicate your problem:



Image 1: a 0.001 pt circle progressively scaled by x10 (image form CC2017 but results in cs 5 are comparable)

I can however replicate the problem on CS6

After having tracked down a cs6 version i can verify that this indeed happens.

I can even roundtrip a full double float value for example:

in 0100000001110111011010111110101110000101000111101011100001010010
out 0100000001110111011010111110110000000000000000000000000000000000


So it seems that the internal value of the system is certainly not a double float. Single float perhaps? It would make sense for a early version of a hardware acceleration code!

I have to test whether that is the case in CC2017 tough.

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