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The best but costly direct approach is to use Adobe Acrobat (not Reader), which can combine files of various formats (a directory of files as well) into a pdf file.
I use an OCR program, Finereader (can read png format) to save the OCRed results in pdf format. That program also allows to save imported files to one or many pdf files without the OCR step. It's been long time since I used a trial version of Finereader, which does not allow to save the OCRed results, but you may try it to see if it can save images to pdf before OCR. Anyway, you may wish to buy Finereader if you decide to convert your pdf or image files to Word or other text format.
As for the freeware, out of many programs that can print any format to pdf, you need the one that converts a number of png files to one pdf file rather than printing every png file to a separate pdf file. While I have not searched internet for that, one of the options (still requires an additional step) is converting your png files to a multipage tiff file (free Irfanview does it in batch) and print multipage tiff to pdf.
BTW. If you are interested in joining separate pdf files into one, I can attach a free program that I downloaded from the net a few years ago (together with a split program for pdf files).
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