We present experimental results showing the appearance of a near-continuum in the high-order harmonic generation (HHG) spectra of atomic and molecular species as the driving laser intensity of an infrared pulse increases. Detailed macroscopic simulations reveal that these near-continuum spectra are capable of producing IAPs in the far field if a proper spatial filter is applied. Further, our simulations show that the near-continuum spectra and the IAPs are a product of strong temporal and spatial reshaping (blue shift and defocusing) of the driving field. This offers a possibility of producing IAPs with a broad range of photon energy, including plateau harmonics, by mid-IR laser pulses even without carrier-envelope phase stabilization.It has been a decade since the first reported generation of isolated attosecond pulses (IAPs) [1] and the first full characterization of an attosecond pulse train (APT) [2], both seminal results that gave birth to the field of attosecond science [3][4][5][6][7]. While APTs can be now routinely generated based on high-order harmonic generation (HHG) in gases, production of IAPs is still a very active field of research. Common to all methods of generating IAPs is the concept of temporal gating, which is used to select a XUV burst from an APT. Current methods can be divided into three different categories. The most intuitive, but technically demanding, approach is based on XUV spectral filtering near the cutoff of the HHG spectra. This approach requires a short driving pulse (about two optical cycle) with a stabilized carrierenvelope phase. [6,8]. This approach could be called intensity gating, as it selects the harmonics emitted near the peak of the most intense half-cycle of the (short) laser pulse. The second approach is based on polarization gating [9][10][11], and the generalized double optical gating [12][13][14], in which the short driving pulse requirement is somewhat relaxed. While these two approaches have their origin already in the single-atom response, the third approach is based on the macroscopic propagation effects [15], which includes, ionization gating [16][17][18], phase matching [19], and ionization-driven reshaping Gaarde et al [15,20]. It has also been demonstrated recently that near-continuum spectra can be generated with two-color multicycle driving laser pulses by carefully adjusting the wavelength of the supplementary pulse [21].In order to produce a short IAP, XUV radiation with a broad frequency bandwidth needs to be generated. Since the HHG cutoff law is Ω cutof f ∼ I L λ 2 L , there are only two ways to extend Ω cutof f : increasing the laser intensity I L , or increasing the laser wavelength λ L . The first option is limited by ionization, which dramatically reduces HHG yield due to the depletion of neutral atoms and, more importantly, the phase mismatching due to free electrons in the medium. Using a short laser pulse does not help much, since the current technology nearly reaches the one-cycle limit already. The second option is to use lasers with a lo...