Comment 19 for bug 722285

I'm almost certain the canvas limits of +/- 8,388,608 only apply for later versions of goocanvas. For a long time, all the distros have shipped version 0.15 of goocanvas - it is now at version 2.0.1. The important part from that page is this:

<< Prior to Cairo 1.6 16 bits were used for the integer part and 16 bits for the fractional part, meaning values were limited to +/- 32,768 >>

On my system (Linux Mint 11), Cairo is version 1.10.

However, in the last few weeks goocanvas 2.01 has finally been packaged in Ubuntu, although strangely not in Debian. So hopefully soon we can make some progress on this issue. It might not be totally straightforward though, as we will somehow have to deal with all the potential users who won't be on the latest distros and so won't have goocanvas2.