I had a folder full of scanned PDFs - old contracts, receipts, a couple of books - and none of them were searchable. No Ctrl-F, no copy-paste, just pictures of text. I wanted to fix that. I did not want to upload any of it to a website, and I really did not want to spend an evening installing a toolchain to do it.
That turns out to be a surprisingly awkward corner.
The two usual answers, and what each one costs
OCRmyPDF is the tool everyone points you to, and deservedly - it's excellent, mature, does PDF/A, handles dozens of languages. But "just install it" means Python plus Tesseract plus Ghostscript plus unpaper plus pikepdf. On Windows especially that's a bad afternoon. And Ghostscript is AGPL - a copyleft dependency I'd rather not build a product on top of. Great tool; the install is the tax.
Online OCR sites are the easy path - until you look at what you're uploading. A passport. A signed contract. A medical scan. A tax form. "Drag your sensitive document onto our server" is exactly the thing you shouldn't do with the documents that most need OCR. Ads, limits, watermarks are the least of it.
