What controls the size of a .pdf?

[suedog1414]

If I have a 50-page document that want to turn into a .pdf, I'm getting various sizes of pdf's depending on how it was created.  I've used three separate means of creating the .pdf and each item is vastly different in size.  1) Scanned into my pc using the multi function printer, 2) Imported into our document management system using a .pdf printer,  3) Drag and dropped pdf into document management  system.  How do you manage this?  This came up because the size limitations of our exchange server.  Some .pdfs are too big to email.  Any suggestions?

[George_Johnson]

What type of document is the source document? When you scan, everything on the page is an image, which could be high resolution or low resolution, and different types of compression can be used. You can also use OCR to add real text to a document so it can be searched. When you import it into the document management system, it could possibly add various types of compression and optimizations, so without knowing more details about it, it's hard to give much guidance.

[suedog1414]

Thank you for the response George.  The document is a 50-page insurance policy.  All text, no images.  Do you know if different versions of Acrobat create varied sizes of .pdfs or does it all come down to what the content of the .pdf is?  If it contains images than naturally, it would be bigger in size?