Please listen to me: we don't need any new-fangled schemes for HWR; the perfect HWR engine for handhelds already exists. It's called ParaGraph, is marketed a.o. as the Windows product PenOffice and does 99+% correct recognition of printed, cursive or mixed text in dozens of languages.

The only problem is that the company who makes it, Phatware, refuses to port the engine to Linux. And yes: I say "refuses", because the origin of ParaGraph is as non-Windows as it gets: ParaGraph started out as one of the 2 HWR engines in the Newton MessagPad (and those who never used a MessagePad will please refrain from stupid Simpson or Doonesbury remarks about it, it really really is very good).