Positioning artwork in Illustrator for Epilog Helix

[Karl Lautman]

Newbie here. I recently bought a 9-year old Epilog Helix. It's my first laser so I'm still dialing it in and learning my way around. I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS5 to print a circle in the upper-left corner of my document. I've set everything I can think of to 24"W x 12"H (in Illustrator and the Epilog driver), and upper-left alignment, and still my artwork appears in the Illustrator print dialog, and prints, centered. Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong? Let me know if should post this in Adobe's Illustrator forum instead. Thanks.

[Keith Winter]

Hi don't have an Epilog but I do use Illustrator. From what you describe it sounds like you are wanting the whole artboard to print instead of cropped to the art in the center. There is a print setting somewhere in there, maybe on an advanced print screen that shrinks your artboard to the size of the art when you print. Sounds like you want the whole blank artboard to print, so you need to turn that setting off if you want the whole artboard to print, and it to not auto crop to the size of the art itself.

[Karl Lautman]

Thanks, I'll look into that. I thought that by printing the whole artboard, with the artwork in the upper left, I would actually avoid this problem. I guess not. It occurred to me I could also place a 24" x 18" border around the artboard and make it vector if my artwork is raster (or vice versa) and that might keep my artwork positioned accurately within the artboard and print it where I want without printing the border.