My particular needs for PDF creation are somewhat unusual, so I'm not surprised that Acrobat Pro seems to be the only thing that suits my needs. If anyone knows of a PDF creation library that has good support for the various image compression schemes supported by PDF, I'd love to know about it. Currently I'm using a 10 year old paid version of Acrobat Pro because I'm unwilling to spend another $500 to get a modern co…
Look into what OpenLibrary is using. I don't remember it off the top of my head, but there is a special image format for efficiently compressing scanned pages of text. Their files are vastly smaller than jpeg at the same quality.
They have an enterprise PDF compression toolkit which clearly supports all the advanced compression schemes of PDF, but it is too rich for me: prices are not given, just a button to ask for a quote. There is a personal PDF tool for $129 but they don't make clear if it also supports their top quality PDF compression.