You've got a box of old letters in beautiful cursive handwriting. Maybe they're from your grandmother, or century-old family correspondence, or even just your own journal entries from before everyone started typing everything. There's just one problem: you can't easily work with them. Your scanner's OCR provides unreadable results, ChatGPT looks promising but loses track after the first page.
In this guide, I'll show you how to use Handwriting OCR to read those impossible to read cursive letters and documents - and translate them too!
Why Traditional OCR Fails at Cursive
If you've already tried your scanner's OCR or uploaded an image to Google Drive, you know the frustration: the results are complete gibberish. Maybe 50% accurate if you're lucky, with random symbols scattered throughout.
Here's why: Traditional OCR was built for printed text. It works by identifying separate, distinct letters - like the ones you're reading right now. Each letter has clear boundaries and consistent shapes.
Cursive breaks all those rules. Letters flow together into one continuous line. Your 'e' connects to your 'n' which connects to your 'o', with no clear separation. Even worse, cursive letters change shape depending on what comes before and after them - the 'a' at the start of a word looks completely different from an 'a' in the middle.
That's why your scanner OCR gives up and produces nonsense. It's trying to find individual letters that don't exist as separate units.
What you need is OCR specifically trained on handwriting. These systems understand how cursive actually works - the flow, the connections, the variations. That's the difference between 50% accuracy (unusable) and 95%+ accuracy (actually helpful).
Let's turn that cursive into something you can actually use.
How to Convert a Cursive Letter
I'm going to walk you through converting an actual cursive letter using HandwritingOCR.com. No technical complexity, no confusing setup - just the straightforward process that takes about 5 minutes.
For this demo, I'm using a handwritten letter from a soldier written in 1945 with flowing cursive script, a bit faded but still legible to the human eye.
Step 1: Prepare Your Document
Take a clear photo with your phone or scan the document. If you have access to a desktop scanner, use it - you'll get a better quality result. If you're using your phone as a scanner, here are a few quick tips:
- Good lighting helps (natural light is best)
- Try to keep the camera straight above the page
- Make sure the whole text is in frame
- Don't worry too much about shadows or slight wrinkles - the AI handles those
Save it as a JPG or PDF.
Step 2: Upload scanned file
Go to handwritingocr.com and create an account. Don't worry, it only takes a few moments, and there's nothing to pay: you receive free trial credits to get started.
Click "Select files" to find and upload your scanned document, and make sure you choose "Extract full text" as the action. Uploading will start automatically.
Step 3: Wait a few seconds
Processing typically takes less thirty seconds per page, so you won't need to wait long. Just sit back until the dashboard automatically refreshes to show your results.
Step 4: Review
Now that your document is processed, you can view the results and, if necessary, make any changes with our built-in text editor.
Accuracy check: In this letter, the OCR correctly identified 357 out of 362 words - that's 99% accuracy. The 5 errors were mostly unusual proper names and one very faded word at a crease. Even those were close enough that I could tell what they should be.
Time saved: Typing this letter manually would have taken 45-60 minutes. This process took less than 1 minute, plus maybe 3 minutes to review and correct those 5 words.
That's the difference between a tedious afternoon project and something you can knock out during your coffee break.
Step 5: Translate to another language (optional)
Many old cursive letters are written in languages like German, French, Spanish, or Italian. If your cursive document is in another language, you can translate it to English (or any other major language) right after transcription. Here's how to do it:
- After your cursive is converted to text, click the "Translate" button
- Choose your target language
- Get your translated text in seconds
This is perfect for those German church records and family letters, French genealogy documents, Spanish historical correspondence, Italian immigration papers, or any other cusrive document in a language you can't read.
Example: Our soldier's letter? If it had been written in French or German, you could convert the cursive to digital text first, then translate it to English - all in one workflow, no copy-pasting between tools.
Step 6: Export your results
Once you've made any edits and are happy with the results, you can save the finished result to your computer. Click the "Download" button to view the options for saving your results to your computer.
These options include:
- Download as a Word document (the best option if you want to continue working on the document later)
- Download as a PDF (great if you want to share the results with others)
- Download as plain text (we use Markdown, which helps to preserves most of the formatting in your document)
- You can also copy and paste directly the text directly from the page. Look for the copy icon.
You'll also see options to include the original document as a thumbnail in your Word or PDF export, paper sizes, and more.
All done!
In just a few minutes, by following the guide above, you can take even the most difficult to read cursive and translate it into a digital format that works for you, whether you want to preserve a letter for the future, or make it editable in the software you like to use.
As always, if you have any questions about reading cursive documents, and transforming them into editable, accurate digital text, you can always get in touch with us at support@handwritingocr.com