Since you’re on a Linux box, I would highly recommend Google’s open source project ocropus. It’s not PHP, but I think it will be your best option. Of course you can call it from within PHP via exec. Its mature and has a lot of options. From the project site: The OCRopus engine is based … Read more
In short, you would have to train the Tesseract engine to recognize the handwriting. Take a look at this link: Tesseract handwriting with dictionary training This is what the linked post says: It’s possible to train tesseract to recognize handwriting. Here are the instructions: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Training-Tesseract But don’t expect very good results. Academics have typically gotten … Read more