Very cool that KDE Plasma 6.6 includes Spectacle, a screenshot application, which can perform OCR on images. See the demonstration video in the last web-link.

Of course I wanted to try this as soon as possible. But how to get the brand new Plasma 6.6 ? And can Spectacle be used on a non-KDE desktop ?

For Debian, Linux Mint and Ubuntu there appears no option to have Spectactle

with OCR installed with an easy option. No Flatpak, no Snap and no AppImage to be found. And Debian Unstable had a 6.5.x version. I can imagine it will not take very long before 6.6.x When I wanted to test this I didn’t find out when OCR support was added to which Spectacle version, but as you can see in this interesting thread (with several script suggestions which may work for other screen shot programs!) it seems 6.5.3 may have it as well.

I decided to go for ArchLinux and installed Spectacle from Plasma 6.6 without too many KDE dependencies, and installed tesseract with a few tesseract language packs. When I tried to run it on GNOME desktop it gave an error saying that to use Spectacle on Wayland it needs KDE’s Kwin window manager.

Because I didn’t want to install more of KDE I went for Cinnamon desktop and there it worked very fine. Impressive and very useful for long texts from images.

The forum thread mentioned above also shows a comment about this software Normcap, available for Linux, Windows, MacOS.