Optimal compilation of mega PDF's

The company I work for deliver projects with final documentation consisting of between 100.000 and 500.000 pages. Typically we expect some 1,5 GB per every 30.000 set of pages.

In the typical project all this documentation is delivered to us from some 200 sub-suppliers all over the world with different programs, settings, scanners, PDF programs etc. This means that the documentation we receive is of different quality and file size for every submission.

As an example, on supplier might deliver some 200 pages with a file size of 200 MB while another supplier compile 200 pages in only 10 MB.

Our final documentation is typically a compilation of many sub documents, some 2000 to 10000 individual documents / document numbers. This means every document is opened by us as a PDF before we compile the final documentation.

I want to know the best possible settings for achieving the optimal compromise between file size and quality for this kind of file size. A few criteria's:

- Every page needs to be text recognized to make the document searchable

- Many pages is already scanned / copied from our sub-suppliers, meaning that the quality can be limited. We can't decrease the quality making the documents unreadable.

- Every page needs to be of a recognized format meaning that it needs to work perfectly with the most common PDF software's and for printing purposes.

Please be specific in your answers. I am looking for detailed setting to configure the Adobe Acrobat properly for this task.

I foresee a combination of solutions:

- Adobe PDF printer and related settings

- Text recognition and related settings

- Reduced size PDF and related settings

- Optimized PDF and related settings

The settings needs to be general enough to work perfect with all different kind of PDF files our sub-suppliers provide to us. We want to optimize all documents the same and typically lack time to elaborate with the settings for each and every set of documents.

The final compiled file we deliver to our customer shall be locked for editing if that has any impact.