Reading text off screen

[Alan]

I had an interesting idea for my semester independant studies project...

My idea was to read text off the screen by analyzing the pixels. Then creating a scripting language that could perform extremely dynamic tasks since it could parse a screen capture and extract raw data from it.

Programming aside, has this (or someting simular) ever been done before? Id like some input/critisizm

[helios]

Yes, it's called optical character recognition, or OCR; a subfield of computer vision. Recognition of printed Latin script is more or less a solved problem.

[Alan]

thats interesting thanks alot