White border

Larry G. Schneider wrote: That's a function of your printer.

Barbara,

To be more specific, Illustrator can only print to the printable area reported by your printer. If you don't have "Borderless Printing" enabled or available on your printer, then Illustrator will be unable to print all the way to the edge.

To find out if your printer has a borderless printing option, try searching Google for "(your printer model) borderless print". You should get information regarding your printer's ability to do so.

If you're printing on a laser printer, it is highly unlikely that you'll be able to print all the way to the edge, and you'll need to manually trim off that white border after printing.  If you have an inkjet, you may well have the ability to print borderless, you'll just need to enable it in the settings.

To access your printer's settings, when you're in the Print dialog in Illustrator, click the "Setup" button in the lower-left corner. You'll get a warning dialog from Illustrator regarding setting your print options within Illustrator's dialog box, but Borderless Printing is one option that Illustrator can't set. Click Continue.  Then, choose your printer, click "Preferences", and set your Borderless Print option based on the information from your Google search.

Be aware that for most printers, borderless printing means the printer will enlarge the document size to be slightly larger than the actual paper size, or "bleed" it off the edges, to make sure there's no white border left anywhere in case the paper alignment is off. If you have anything right next to an edge, you'll likely lose it.

Without more information (document dimensions, paper size, printer model, your printer settings), it's impossible to provide exact instructions or details, but this should help point you in the right direction.

Good Luck!