Over the last few decades, research on handwriting recognition has made impressive progress. The research and development on handwritten word recognition are to a large degree motivated by many application areas, such as automated postal address and code reading, data acquisition in banks, text-voice conversion, security, etc. As the prices of scanners, com- puters and handwriting-input devices are falling steadily, we have seen an increased demand for handwriting recognition systems and software pack- ages. Some commercial handwriting recognition systems are now available in the market....