What kind of printer are you printing too? Illustrator defaults its page setup if you have a print driver installed. For instance, on my canon, i have a 1/4' margin on top, and a 3/4 margin on bottom, on my HP everything is even 1/4 all the way around, some printers treat postscripts differently (or so I have been told). Have never been able to adjust it, thats just how the cookie crumbles.

Have you tried using the 'page' tool? If you select the hand tool and hold down the mouse, it will bring up a sub-menu, to the right should be a page tool, if you hold down your mouse button with that tool over your document, it should show you where your printing guidelines are for that page. Let us know where you stand after you try that, but illy is freakign whack that way, if I need my doc to be perfect I usually save as a .pdf, open it in PS and print (scale to fit media) and im usually good. Hope that helps and welcome to the GDF!!

5 midgets......spanking a man....covered in 1000 island dressing. Is that love making? - Token

yeah, D-Frag. Think you hit it with the page tool. Except, as soon as you click that tool onto the page, that's where the page set up will land. Cllick on the page and drag the page box around until your page is inside or matches the borders. Only what's inside the inner border will print.

PrintDriver is a large format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

so, if the computer is reading the artboard in the wrong spot, moving the page will help with one end of the printable area, but may well screw up the other. i had an issue like this the other day and couldn't sort it out. it's a new thing, too (for me) so i just had to figure out what area would print (through trial and error) and keep within that.

pain in the arse. i'd very much like to know how this can be solved - it's like my printer changed it's page setup for one document only. what i'd like to know is how to 'refresh' the page setup for the printer (if that's even possible) and be able to move the artboard, too - because you can move your page around, but if it's off the artboard it doesn't get printed either.

so dumb. and i'm not sure if i'm talking about me or the software.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams

The artboard is the File>document set-up.
The File>Page set-up determines the size and orientation of the 'page box' for your printer.
Sometimes you can't see the page box. Go to View>Show Page Tiling to give you the page box outline.
I have had the printer default to some landscape page setups for some unknown reason. Usually the 8.5 x 11 just needs to be swapped in page layout. Bizzarre.

PrintDriver is a large format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing