This may be useful for Lovecraft scholars. Paperwork is free open-source desktop software that helps a scholar get to grips with and search inside their PDF folders. It copies and OCRs your PDFs and other documents, puts the new OCR versions in its new C:\Users\YOURNAME\papers\ folder, and then searches across them quickly.

It has an interface that is slick but is difficult to like, yet doesn’t demand you join a social network or hook your data into the cloud.

It could also be used simply as a batch OCR tool and folder-watcher. To create OCR’d PDFs to be searched by other more powerful desktop search tools — such as dtSearch Desktop.

There appears to be no support for German “black letter” OCR in Paperwork, so it may not handle your folder full of scans of the Necronomicon and similar.