Abstract: A system (method and apparatus) for handwritten character recognition recognizes characters within strings of text despite the presence of overlapping or disjointed characters. A string is segmented into discrete characters by removing noise and punctuation, joining the disconnected components of characters and splitting probable overlapping characters. After joining and splitting (as required), character recognition is performed to recognize characters in the string. Recognized characters are removed and the string is split in order that more characters can be recognized. If unrecognized characters remain in the string, the process is repeated. The joining and splitting operations are repeated until all subsequent characters in the string have been either recognized or determined to be unrecognizable.