This document provides a literature review of handwritten character recognition techniques. It discusses the basic workflow of character recognition systems, including pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification, and post-processing. It then reviews several published papers on character recognition in various languages and scripts, comparing different feature extraction and classification methods. Specifically, it examines techniques like principal component analysis, neural networks, template matching, and Hidden Markov Models. The review finds that while accuracy has improved, obtaining 100% accuracy in character recognition remains a challenge due to variability in handwriting styles.