Digital Humanities

Here are some digital tools essential for my workflow:

Markdown + Pandoc is how I write papers these days. I used to rely on Microsoft Word but Markdown makes it easy to focus on writing and not letting the styling get in the way. It also has robust support for footnotes and citations if you use the right editor with the right plugins.

Microsoft Edge is, perhaps surprisingly my everyday PDF reader. It has very solid search and highlight features. Not having to open up another app feels really great.
Foxit Reader is fast, lightweight, and free; equipped with advanced search functions (e.g. folder search and search & highlight) and split view (so you can read two parts of the document at once, such as main text and endnotes). For OCR and other advanced features, a subscription is needed, but it's rather affordable compared to Adobe Acrobat Pro. There is also a split view feature in Microsoft Word and Excel, so that you don't have to jump between pages all the time.
PDF-XChange Editor is a free PDF reader and also the only easy-to-use and reliable free OCR option that I can find.
Tesseract is an open-source OCR option for the more technically inclined. See this article to get started. See also OCRmyPDF as a more accessible tool using Tesseract and pytesseract for an example of Python wrapper.

Split View in Foxit Reader