I'd say that the price of software sold to print bureaux reflects the limited market rather than the difficulty to implement it. The problems don't seem any greater than those solved by armies of programmers on early machines, trying to use more bits than the processor inherently supported.

X has a theoretical maximum page size of just under 1 mile square (1.5 x 1.5 Km), however it uses a practical limit of 9 x 9 feet. I'd guess that is the point some value in the rendering engine gets to 32 bits. It probably wouldn't be difficult to convert the algorithm to use 64 bits, but the cost would be to potentially double the rendering time. If my assumption is correct, Xara Ltd have traded the relatively few people who want pages bigger than 9 x 9 feet for the vast majority who want their 800 x 600 pixels rendered fast. Other than the fact that big drawings may contain more objects, I've found no problem working on an 8 x 4 feet page.

Creating or exporting large bitmaps requires large amounts of memory. A large swap file on disk (virtual memory) should be sufficient (1.16 Gb minimum, possibly 2 or 3 times that for an 8 x 4 ft, 24 bit, 300 dpi bitmap), however I'm not certain what proportion of real memory X would require. There may also be 32 bit limitations, as mentioned above, producing errors which appear to be memory related. I'd guess there are several layers of limitations, each relatively simple to cure, but formidable in total. The limited appeal and transportability of giant bitmaps is probably why Xara Ltd haven't tackled the problem.

Regards - Sean