Abstract: In the field of pattern recognition, HCR is one of the most intricate and tricky area. Plenty of works were proposed for foreign languages but a few works exists for south Indian languages due to the complex shape and varying writing styles of individuals. This paper introduces a review of offline and online recognition of different natural languages. HCR is an optical character recognition, which convert the textual document in to machine readable format. To attain 99.9 % accuracy in the field of HCR is very difficult. The efficiency of HCR depend the features extracted and the classifier used.