Artboards in Illustrator

According to Adobe's "Illustrator CS4 Classroom in A Book," "artboards represent the regions that can contain printable artwork. Artboards can be used to crop certain areas for either printing or placement purposes. Multiple artboards come in handy when creating a variety of things, such as printed pages with different sizes, etc."

Artboards include: 1. Printable Area; 2. Nonprintable Area; 3. Edge of the Page; 4. Artboard; 5. Bleed Area; and 6. Canvas.

1. Printable Area- The printable area is bounded by the innermost dotted lines and represents the part of the page on which the selected printer can print. Many printers cannot print to the edge of the paper.
2. Nonprintable Area- This area is between the two sets of dotted lines and represents any nonprintable margin of the page. The printable and nonprintable areas is determined by the printer and selected in the Print Options dialog box.
3. Edge of the Page- This is indicated by the outermost set of dotted lines.
4. Artboard- This is bounded by solid lines and represents the entire region that can contain printable artwork. By default, the artboard is the same size as the page, but it can be enlarged or reduced. The U.S. default artboard is 8.5" x 11", but it can be set as large as 227" x 227".
5. Bleed Area- Bleed is the amount of artwork that falls outside of the printing bounding box or outside the crop area and trim marks.
6. and Canvas- This is the area outside the artboard that extends to the edge of the 227" square window. Objects placed on the canvas are visible on the screen, but they do not print.