ocr'ing application text (not scanned, NOT captchas)

I'd like to interface an application by reading the text it displays.

I've had success in some applications when windows isn't doing any font smoothing by typing in a phrase manually, rendering it in all windows fonts, and finding a match - from there I can map each letter image to a letter by generating all letters in the font.

This won't work if开发者_如何学C any font smoothing is being done, though, either by Windows or by the application. What's the state of the art like in OCRing computer-generated text? It seems like it should be easier than breaking CAPTCHAs or OCRing scanned text. Where can I find resources about this? So far I've only found articles on CAPTCHA breaking or OCRing scanned text.

I prefer solutions easily accessible from Python, though if there's a good one in some other lang I'll do the work to interface it.

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I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I think just reading the text with an OCR program would work well.

Tesseract is amazingly accurate for scanned documents, so a specific font would be a breeze for it to read. Here's my Python OCR solution: Python OCR Module in Linux?.

But you could generate each character as an image and find the locations on the image. It (might) work, but I have no idea how accurate it would be with smoothing.