Abstract: A universal symbolic handwriting recognition system for converting user entered time ordered stroke sequences into computer readable text is described. The system operates on two levels: (1) a word-level recognizer, which recognizes the entire group of strokes as a unit, and (2) a parser-level recognizer, which breaks the strokes into segments and recognizes groups of stroke segments within a word, thus recognizing separate characters or character sequences within a word to build a complete recognition string. In both recognition levels, the system trains on actual user samples, either on an entire word, or on a character or character sequence within a word. It does so by building a user specific sample recognition data-base file of text/pattern pairs, where the text is specified by the user in a word confirmation process and the pattern, composed of an index and a feature vector, is created from the actual user input strokes.