[palmy]

This is great!

Also made some minor modifications: replaced `xsel` with `xclip` and added truncated version of the copied text to the `notify-send`:

  #!/bin/bash 
  # Dependencies: tesseract-ocr imagemagick 
  # on gnome: gnome-screenshot 
  # on kde: spectacle
  # on x11: xsel
  # on wayland: wl-clipboard

  die(){
    notify-send "$1"
    exit 1
  }
  cleanup(){
    [[ -n $1 ]] && rm -r "$1"
  }

  SCR_IMG=$(mktemp -d) || die "failed to take screenshot"

  # shellcheck disable=SC2064
  trap "cleanup '$SCR_IMG'" EXIT

  #notify-send "Select the area of the text" 
  if  which "spectacle" &> /dev/null
  then
    spectacle -n -b -r -o "$SCR_IMG/scr.png" || die "failed to take screenshot"
  else
    gnome-screenshot -a -f "$SCR_IMG/scr.png" || die "failed to take screenshot"
  fi

  # increase image quality with option -q from default 75 to 100
  mogrify -modulate 100,0 -resize 400% "$SCR_IMG/scr.png"  || die "failed to convert image"
  #should increase detection rate

  tesseract "$SCR_IMG/scr.png" "$SCR_IMG/scr" &> /dev/null || die "failed to extract text"
  if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]
  then 
    wl-copy < "$SCR_IMG/scr.txt" || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"
  else
    # xsel -b -i  < "$SCR_IMG/scr.txt" || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"
    xclip -selection clipboard -i < "$SCR_IMG/scr.txt" || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"  
  fi
  # Notify the user what was copied but truncate the text to 100 characters
  notify-send "Text extracted from image" "$(head -c 100 "$SCR_IMG/scr.txt")" || die "failed to send notification"
  exit

[boneitis]

I just frankenstein'd a few people's versions into my own MATE-based flavor.

For anyone running into barriers, mate-screenshot has no outfile `-f` option, so I worked around that by outputting through clipboard and capturing that with `xclip` (note, this is earlier in the script than the the xsel/xclip line in the parent and gp comments):

  mate-screenshot -a -c && xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o > "$SCR_IMG/scr.png" || die "failed to take screenshot"

The other hiccup is that the dumped text file has two extraneous bytes '\x0a\x0c', so I truncated them with `head`:

  (xclip -selection clipboard -i < <(head -c -2 "$SCR_IMG/scr.txt")) || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"

Might not be pretty, but it looks like this will work for me. Thank you all for this!