Hello, JoeDaft and Joe053204-xrx,
Our IM setup is geared to a large enterprise. Users can't access individual printers on the network. Jobs are sent to a central network printing queue, then users go to individual printers to have it print jobs from the central queue. There is no network path info provided for the individual printers.
I have asked IT staff to look at templates, but so far, they are quite comfortable with 350KB minimum sizes because they can be successfully opened. I have explained my concern, which is how such files quickly accumulate into megabytes, and if sent by email, they also bog down mailboxes.
I also looked from some of the factors affecting scan file size on the user panel on the physcial printer. There is no control for OCR and the compression is "medium". My understanding is that compression is usually JPG based, which means good for images with colour and grayscale gradients, but not great for things like schematics and text.
As I describe in the original post, however, the image files themselves are small. The PDF container file is wasteful of space. So image compression is probably not the major culprit, though as I said, it may be a partial culprit just based on the fact that if I repackage the images into PDF, the file size is one fifth of the scan file size.
As for OCR, I'm not too familiar with how that is done in PDF, but if there is no recognizable text, I wonder if space would be wasted on font information within the PDF file. That's the case with my scans -- hand drawn schematics and hand scrawl, unlikely that there would be recognizable text.