[severine]

You could simply pipe an area screenshot to tesseract, discard the input image and get the tesseract output, am I wrong?

[NewDimension]

That sounds like a valid approach, any idea what tools I could use to get the define the area and get the screenshot?

[severine]

You possibly have one installed. Mine comes with my desktop (Xfce), and gives me a GUI and a CLI to take screenshots of the full desktop, any window, or a particular area defined by crosshairs.

There's a very popular and minimalist CLI called scrot that I think would be ideal... well scratch that, I made a search and our question has already been asked and answered:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/280475/how-can-instantaneous...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21497447/ocr-on-a-screen...

[mkl]

If I remember correctly, I did it with the ImageMagick "import" command. I found I had to add a wide white border, as Tesseract got confused near the edges of the image (this was over 10 years ago though).