Illustrator...problem with printable area !!!

[sayamish]

Hello buddies....
I'm a very new member of this forum and new to Adobe Illustrator too. I've learnt to design in Illustrator to some extent by going throug online resources. Presently, I'm working on brochure designing. Before commencing the designing work, I had chosen "Letter" for size with CMYK color mode in document setup. Is that choice okay for brochure designing ?
And yet more, though the job is not done fully, I tested how it would look like by printing my artwork. In paper, artwork doesn't get printed as it looks in illustrator preview. It prints cutting few cms in left, top, right and bottom sides of the paper due to which full artwork can't be seen. What's the main problem on that ? Can't I just adjust the printable area in Illustrator ? If it can be, how can I do that ? How can I get that printed exactly as it is seen in Illustrator ?Please help me out from this problem. Any sort of suggestion would be highly appreciated . Thanx in advance. Bye.

[chalsema]

Unfortunately, this is nothing you can adjust. Your printer cannot print all the way to the edge. These blank spaces are where the printer "grabs" onto the paper to pull it through the printer. The only way to print all the way to the edge is to print on a larger piece of paper and cut the paper down to the proper size.

Also, brochure design is better done in InDesign or Quark because you can't have multiple page documents in Illustrator.

Good luck. I hope all of this made sense.

[donkarthik]

problem lies not in illustrator.. u need to understand how ur printer functions, u will need to change the printable area settings on ur printer which should help to a large extent. any case, i do not think u can print all the way to the edges, so like chalsema said, print on a slightly larger paper. but definitely, u can make ur printre print pretty close to the edges, by reducing the non printable margin properties on ur printer.

[PrintDriver]

Most printers have default margins you can't change. Especially desktop inkjets. Some of the newer ones printe edge to edge but not all.

[defjoe]

you can have it print on say, a 11x17 paper and have the crop marks to you know where to cut. but if this is something printed in house... they get your ruler and x-acto ready cause your gonna do alot of cutting.

[PrintDriver]

Don't forget the bandaids too.
:D