@Jules that’s right, thank you for your help!
Your Glowforge bed can accommodate materials measuring 18 x 20.4”. Your Glowforge has a maximum printable area of approximately 11″ (279 mm) deep and 19.5″ (495 mm) wide, and it’s reduced somewhat when the laser operates at high speed, as it can take space for the laser to decelerate.
This means not all of the bed is displayed, or available to be printed on, so there will always be about an inch of space on the left. Just like @dklgood mentioned, this material can be reused as scrap later for small pieces. For example, a lot of customers use small pieces of scrap to print these pins available in the free laser design section: Honeycomb bed holdown pins
I’m going to close this thread - if you run into an issue with your Glowforge please open up a new thread or contact us directly at support@glowforge.com