Comment 1 for bug 171528

This seems pretty "ambitious" and quite far outside the
scope of Inkscape as an SVG Editor. Projects such as gnome
scan are likely to incorporate Optical character recognition
(OCR) and it might be easier to get them to then export the
text in a format suitable for use in Inkscape.
http://home.gna.org/gnomescan/

(I mean with projects like potrace the work was already done
by someone else and even then Inkscape wrapped the command
line utitlity rather than use the library version potrace)

still this request is positively modest compared to another
request which asks for not only text OCR but also
recognition of the font styles.
see also:
[ 1536491 ] Font recognition from vector paths
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1536491&group_id=93438&atid=604309