Why don't laser printers print to the edge of the page?

When printing a newsletter on your laser printer, you may notice that your printer will leave a white gap around the page instead of printing right to the edge.

A page printed on a printer with the white edging

Unfortunately, there is no way to force your printer to print to the edge of a page.  The reason for this is that when the paper was even slightly misaligned, parts of the image would be printed on the internals of the printer - such as the drum or rollers - rather than the paper. This would both impact the following prints and damage the printer.

If the paper was misaligned, the areas outside the black
box wouldprint on the printer roller and/or drum

What you can do?
There are three options you can pursue to tackle this problem:

• Create designs which take your printer's gap into account and don't have colour and photos to the edge of the page
• Print out your design on a page which is bigger than your design. You can then trim it down with a stanley knife and ruler to the correct size. For example, you can print your design on an A3 page and cut it down to A4.
• Similar to the above solution, if you don't have an A3 printer, you can scale your design so that it is slightly smaller than an A4 page. It will then print your entire design within the printable areas of the page and can be trimmed to size.