photoshop crashing when exporting artboards to PDF

[mmezocartus]

All, I need a hand.  It has become a regular part of my workflow to use artboards to create multi-page documents in photoshop.  Until recently this has worked just great for me, however suddenly photoshop is crashing every time I try and use this feature.

at home - it crashes IMMEDIATELY when I try to run the feature, while processing the first artboard.  this is consistent behavior, I can however recall this feature did work once or twice at home.  I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling photoshop, however the behavior remains consistent now.

at work - this had previously worked (until today), however now it tries to process a few of the artboards and then it crashes.  I do not have the account privileges to install/uninstall, and updates don't get automatically installed so I cant imagine what has changed that is causing this.

to quickly explain my work flow - I flatten everything down to a single image for each artboard (this reduced file size and memory issues) before exporting the PDF.  So it shouldn't be a memory issue, I think.

has anyone else experienced this?  have you figured out a solution?

Matt.

[arborcreativestudios]

Thank you so much for posting this Matt! I also rely on Photoshop Artboards extensively for my daily workflow and exported Artboards to PDF without issue until a few weeks ago.

Now, when I try to export, my computer will either crash upon attempt or export a PDF so large it's unmanageable for my clients (a staggering 250MB PDF in comparison to the roughly 7MB PDF I would get previously.)

I haven't been able to figure out any way to adjust the PDF settings since the "Export Artboards to PDF" dialogue box offers significantly fewer options then the standard "Export to PDF" dialogue box. Would greatly appreciate any insight into this problem.

[mmezocartus]

ok, I was able to figure out what was happening.  in discussing with adobe tech support, there is some kind of a bug in the new "export artboards to PDF" feature of photoshop CC 2018.

1 - regarding the size:  I had the same issue, it seemed to be due to 2 things.  the first was that because they had uninstalled/reinstalled my copy of photoshop it had reverted to its default settings, and the second was that it didn't treat smart objects the same as it had previously.  once I flattened my artboards out, and set the encoding option to "zip", the exported PDF files size became normal again.

2 - regarding the crashing: it seems they introduced a bug where if A) the length of the artboard name is long enough and B) the beginning of the names are similar enough, it would either crash during export of the PDF, or it would create the PDF with duplicate pages (any page named too similarly would just duplicate the first page in the series with a similar name).  renaming my artboards so that the differentiating text was at the beginning solved that issue.

(3) another issue I found was that if the current default printer settings are "not compatible" (so photoshop wanted to show a dialog error asking me if I wanted to discard those settings), it would crash during export to PDF as it didn't handle that error and dialog correctly.

I hope that helps.

[jeffreyv35362181]

For me this issue had popped back up in 2021 and thanks to your comment I was able to solve it, hopefully it might help others:

When exporting I got an empty error message with only the yellow triangle. Turned out it was related to your point 3, because of the recent Microsoft security issues with the print spooler our IT department had disabled the printer spooler service on all windows machines. Enabling the print spooler service had solved this issue for me. 

[arborcreativestudios]

Yes this does help! Flattening worked like a charm. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply here.

Wow. Length/duplicity of Arboard names contribute to the crashing?! Oh my goodness. I would have never figured that out on my own. I'm going to be conscious of that when naming Artboards moving forward and hopefully that will help prevent random crashes. Much appreciated, mmezocartus.