@RbnJrg,
Have you tried compressing the printed pdfs using qhostscript (gs). It seems to work really well.
See
https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...-size-in-linux
I used /ebook settings and could see a very nice quality reducing the file size by a factor of 5 for 4 pages with a large image from 5 meg to just under 1 meg.