Artboard colours, why am I doomed to have a rectangle sitting at the bottom of every document and it being my responsibility for it to be sized beyond the bleed as a crutch for this lacking feature.

Having to check preview in every filter/modifier dialog box instead of the app being properly multithreaded to handle an expensive operation automatically without locking the UI up.

Hiding an object doesn’t remove it from draw operations correctly, if a document contains a heavy object then EVERY interaction with that document will have a second pause while those hidden vectors are processed for some reason.

A4 and A3 paper sizes but not A5… yet they include not one but two Kindle Fire resolutions as defaults. (Can’t find any way to modify this list either)

Mother fucking multipage PDF import, NO EXCUSES! Acrobat profits be damned!

Finally, when exporting for printing Illustrator puts unnecessary responsibility on the designer to make sure they save their document, then outline the fonts then save as a PDF then undo outlining the fonts to make sure that if they leave the doc open future changes don’t happen to a flattened file.

Many designers have a Stockholm Syndrome about this saying you should just be expected to do that but I honestly don’t understand why I have to perform this tedious dance every time I send a file to print and often I have had Junior Designers saving over .ai files with outlined fonts. If they can have a seemingly pointless Save for MS Office menu item why don’t they have a Export for Printers command that automates this and outputs a PDF to an /Exports/ folder leaving the original file completely untouched.

When using software like After Effects the document workflow and export workflow are two entirely different processes, I don’t see why in Illustrator they should occupy the same space when and overlap each other.

In a perfect world I would hit File > Export for Printing then get a dialog up with options for outlining fonts etc and where I want the file saved. Then every time I hit the menu option after that it just exports another file on top of the last one with the same settings.

Making a small copy change for a client with the system I propose

Open File > Change Copy > Save File > Export

The current Illustrator workflow

Open File > Change Copy > Save File > Outline Fonts > Save As > PDF > PDF Dialog > Make sure you close the document to discard the font outlining.