Comment by Moto7451

I have never had to handle handwriting professionally but I have had great success with Tesseract in the past. I’m sure it’s no longer the best free/cheap option but with a little bit of image pre-processing to ensure the text pops from the background and isn’t unnecessarily large (I.e. that 1200dpi scan is overkill) you can have a pretty nice pipeline with good results.

In the mid 2010s I put Tesseract, OCRad (which is decidedly not state of the art), and aspell into a pretty effective text processing pipeline to transform resumes into structured documents. The commercial solutions we looked at (at the time) were a little slower and about as good. If the spellcheck came back with too low of a success rate I ran the document through OCRad which, while simplistic, sometimes did a better job.

I expect the results today with more modern projects to be much better so I probably wouldn’t go that path again. However as all of it runs nicely on slow hardware, it likely still has a place on low power/hobby grade IoT boards and other niches.