Very Little is Free

 The Soda PDF program which I used for OCR would not install after the recent hard disk unpleasantness, so I went looking for other solutions.  (I am still hoping Soda PDF support gets back to me with a solution.)  ReadIris came with my HP printer, but perhaps because of Windows 10 it cannot see the scanner and therefore will not work.  Several free OCR solutions would only OCR jpgs and similar images--not PDFs.  One tried to download a Trojan, so that is off the list.  I was prepared to pay for Adobe Acrobat DC (the non-free version) that does OCR.  The PDFs had some embedded text, so Adobe said to export the PDF as a TIFF, import as a PDF, then OCR.  But it did not consider the TIFF it exported as valid.  I am not buying a product that buggy.