This is actually a 4-year old feature request, formulated in my comment to issue 918 (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tesseract-issues/issue$20918/tesseract-issues/U7g6ntPXYds/aAyTuIFBUhwJ) but I really need it now, cf. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tesseract-dev/d4QQdaq3LF0.