This is an overview of the most recent published approaches to solving the handwriting recognition problem. This paper is aimed at clarifying the role of handwriting recognition in accordance with today's maturing technologies. It tries to list and clarify the components that build handwriting recognition and related technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and Signature Verification. This paper could also be regarded as a survey of handwriting recognition and related topics with a rich list of references for the interested reader. A level of practicality of use of this technology for different languages and cultures is also discussed.