Remove QR Code Border

[RAILhead]

Is there some undocumented, easy way to get rid of the border around InDesign-generated QR codes? That border makes it a huge pain to align with other items, and it's so time consuming to resize the object box perfectly. How easy it would be to simply turn off the borders! Any ideas?

[BobLevine]

What border?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

By "border" do you mean the (usually) white space around the grid?

That's not there from sloppiness or an arbitrary aspect of ID's generator. QR codes must have a dead zone around them to facilitate quick and accurate reads. It's a defined part of the standard. 

You're free to remove them in PS or by cropping, but unless you preserve something like it in your layout, the code may be annoying to use. 

[RAILhead]

This I know, and that's what I currently do — and I layout my work to accomodate required space, thus rendering the built-in white space unnecessary. I'd much prefer to have the code image snap to the margin as opposed to the white border snapping.

I'm going to assume there's no clean way to elimiate this outside of the manual methodologies.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Is using a guideline not a workable option?

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

The transparent edge? No, not that I know of. Are they always the same size? You might play with sizing and then save it as an object style.

~Barb

[RAILhead]

Gotcha — I will look into that! Thank you!

[Angela25876015ammb]

Leaving this here for anyone looking up the same issue in the future: I found a quick and dirty way to do this. Copy the QR code's object into Illustrator. (I didn't find a way to create outlines of it in InDesign.) That will convert it to vector shapes. Copy the width/height and resize the frame in InDesign to those measurements.

The "border" proportions seem to vary depeding on the complexity of the code, otherwise I'd say "just scale it up X%."

[Laubender]

@Barb Binder said in June 2023: "Are they always the same size?"

From the perspective of 2023 when Barb asked this, the answer was "yes".

Now, at least with InDesign 2025, the size of the border changes with the complexity of the QR code.

So @Angela25876015ammb has a point by using the INDD > AI > INDD route of copy/paste.

I have no idea why the developers changed this behavior…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )