If the problem is machine recognition of handwriting, the Graffiti alphabet is both human readable and writable and easy enough for a 32MHz 68030-ish CPU to recognize in realtime.
Graffiti is recognized by observing the strokes (direction, turns, etc) as it is drawn, with each pen lift/touch marking the characters. This is quite a different problem from doing OCR on it in a photograph, where you can (hopefully) see the shapes, but you do not know where the strokes began and ended.