Free Windows Auto OCR is a free and open source OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool for Windows.
It provides a no-setup one-click .exe file.
The tool will run in the background and will automatically detect new PDF files in the folders you specify.
The PDFs will be analyzed using the built-in Windows OCR engine, and the text layer will be added to the PDF.
Optionally, the original file can be moved to a backup folder.
Note: Since the Windows OCR API is used, this tool is only supported on Windows 10+ / Windows 11.
When started, the tool will appear as a small icon in the system tray. You can right-click on it to open the configuration window.
In the configuration window, you can set the following options:
- Folders to watch
- Backup folder (per watched folder) where to move the original file
If you want the tool to run in the background at boot, you can add a link to the .exe file to your windows startup folder in shell:startup.
Requires .NET 8 SDK.
# Debug build
dotnet build src/FreeWindowsAutoOCR.csproj
# Publish single-file .exe
dotnet publish src/FreeWindowsAutoOCR.csproj -c ReleaseThe published .exe will be in src/bin/Release/net8.0-windows10.0.19041.0/win-x64/publish/.
- C# / .NET 8 — WinForms for system tray and config UI
- Windows.Media.Ocr — Built-in Windows 10+ OCR engine (no external dependencies)
- Docnet.Core — PDF page rendering via PDFium (MIT)
- PdfSharpCore — PDF text layer overlay (MIT)
Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or submit a pull request.
Free Windows Auto OCR is licensed under the MIT License.