How to make a fast loaded PDF file in Photoshop?

Question

I'm making my resume in Photoshop CC. The design style I've used is totally flat, so no shadows, and no other effect. Before saving it, I put the background in transparent to make less space to the final PDF file.

I'm exporting to PDF using File > Automate > PDF > Multi-Page Document > (...) Now, in the Adobe PDF Preset I've used various options, same with Compression and other options... and what I've achieved so far is to make my PDF file with a considerable low size. However that's not my goal here, what I want is the PDF file properly displayed when you open it.

My problem is that when I open the file, it takes a while to open and when you scroll the document, some elements disappear until you stop scrolling, where they show again. It's really annoying.

How can I avoid that?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on the position you are aiming at, creating the resumé in Photoshop may disqualify you (for other positions, it may be a plus, of course).

PDF is NOT an image; PDF is a complex document format, and whatever text you have should really not be an image, but, yeah, text. Among the Adobe tools, the tool of choice would be Illustrator (for 1 to 2 pages), or InDesign (for more pages).

Answer 2

I'd suggest you don't use Photoshop. There's no viable reason one needs Photoshop for a resumé/CV. Using InDesign or Illustrator will inherently create faster loading PDFs (provided you are creating overly intricate artwork on the resume.) Even using Word or Pages may be better than Photoshop.

If you must use Photoshop, I would save each page (although a resume should really be only 1 page) as a maximum quality JPG. Yup JPG. Then in Acrobat choose File > Create > Combine Files into a PDF... and choose all your JPGs. Using a flat file such as jpg will dramatically increase the page render speed within the PDF since each and every element doesn't have to be "drawn" on screen. Using a high quality JPG should keep the appearance at a good level while reducing the overall size (kb) of the pages.

Answer 3

You can make the Photoshop PDF to have the smallest file size, but also, with Acrobat you can then process the file again and it'll make it smaller, but beware that doing this will preserve the crisp in the fonts but you'll lose quality on images.

You can also follow this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzD4cVaTQSw

Answer 4

You can lower the size of your PDF by optimizing it and removing some useless data from it. It can also help you to equalize the resolution of all your images and crop the images that are out-of-frame.

See this url to learn how to optmize a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro

Since you,re using Photoshop and want to keep working it with, it's possible to save a few pixels and get a top quality text by converting your text layers to vector. To do this, you simply need to save your Photoshop file with the layers, and open this file in Adobe Illustrator. You will be asked to select between changing the layers to object or flattening the layers into one image; choose the changing to object.

Now you'll have your Photoshop file with your text layers in vector. You can export that new file to a PDF, and use the url above to compress your file, or use the default settings from Illustrator for this. Adobe Acrobat Pro does a better job at compressing though and lower drastically the file size.

See details here on how to convert your layers to vectors.

Also, with Acrobat Pro, you can set up other nice features in the "properties". For example you can select to show your CV in a "fit to page" or "page width". You can also join together many pages of your PDF and create one single PDF file.

Answer 5

Save as a high-resolution image (png) and then convert into PDF. not an ideal method (text cannot be selected), but does the job

Answer 6

Recently ran into this problem myself, 5 years too late for op but it might do someone else some good. I'm still on CS6. I saved it as a .psd and opened it in Illustrator (convert layers to objects) and saved it as .pdf from there. (You might ask why I didn't do it in Illustrator in the first place, but like many others, I'm simply better at PS).

Works great (14mb in PS to less than 500kb from AI), using the "smallest file size" setting in AI. It doesn't rasterize text and shapes, unlike the one in PS. The text remains selectable, which for things like resumes is essential. Just make sure you have your color settings to 8bits/channel before importing it into Illustrator (you can easily change it from Image/Mode), so it doesn't flatten the entire thing. You might need a higher quality setting if you have graphical images though. Ideally you should add them in afterwards.