InDesign’s Content-Aware Fit feature automatically resizes and repositions images to fit inside a frame. While this can be useful for photos and graphics, it can cause problems with patterns and barcodes created using PatternMaker—they may shift inside their frames as soon as they’re generated.
To prevent this, you can turn off Content-Aware Fit as the default frame fitting option. Once disabled, new patterns and barcodes will stay fixed in place when created.
How to turn off Content-Aware Fit:
Open Preferences
On Mac: go to InDesign > Preferences > General
On Windows: go to Edit > Preferences > General
Adjust the setting
At the bottom of the General preferences window, uncheck Make Content-Aware Fit the Default Frame Fitting Option.Click OK to save your changes.
With this setting turned off, your patterns and barcodes will remain aligned as expected when you create them.
When to keep Content-Aware Fit on
Content-Aware Fit is useful in situations where you want InDesign to intelligently scale and position images, such as:
Placing stock photos or graphics into layouts where you don’t want to manually adjust every frame
Working with templates that require images to automatically fill frames without leaving gaps
Quickly importing multiple images into a grid or catalog layout