Recommendation of free OCR software for Windows and Mac which accept PDF files with multiple pages

edited October 6, 2020
Hi,

I'd appreciate your recommendation of free OCR (optical character recognition) software for Windows and Mac that can recognize text on PDF files with multiple pages, adding the recognized text as a layer in the own PDF file (i.e. not creating a new file or converting it to a text file).

Use case:
PDFs in Zotero database cannot be highlighted and have their content extract by ZotFile (http://zotfile.com). There is the need to run OCR first.
The need for a free tool is that Zotero is been taught to students at university, and there is no budge to buy premium OCR tools.
Foxit Reader free was adopted as the default PDF highlighter/markup tool because it is available for Windows and Mac (easier to teach a unique PDF tool to an audience using Windows and Mac computers) and seemed more powerful than the free Adobe Acrobat. However, Foxit Reader lacks OCR functionality.
For instance, desktop software for Windows and Mac that only performs OCR would fit what we are looking for.

Thank you very much,
Carlos

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