Solution for when layers don't save properly in a PDF

Hi everyone,

I was making a party invitation in Photoshop (probably should've done it in InDesign but oh well), and I needed to save it as a PDF. I had two rectangular boxes for text that had a stroke and a fill. I had a few images overlapping on the sides of the boxes. When I saved it to a PDF, somehow the images were showing up over the fill but under the stroke.

The only solution I found was to merge all the layers in the PSD file and then create the PDF, but obviously that rasterizes everything, and I didn't like how blurry the text looked when I zoomed in. A way I found that preserves everything is to group certain layers into smart objects. I grouped the boxes into one smart object and put them just above the background layer, and I grouped the images into one smart object and moved them to the top most layer, and they stayed on top when I saved to PDF!

Just wanted to share a possible solution in case others get stuck like me. Hopefully this helps!