A segment of handwriting is a piece of the pen-tip trajectory

Trajectory

A trajectory is the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass...

 between two defined segmentation points. If the occurrence of a minimum in the absolute (tangential) velocity

Velocity

In physics, velocity is speed in a given direction. Speed describes only how fast an object is moving, whereas velocity gives both the speed and direction of the object's motion. To have a constant velocity, an object must have a constant speed and motion in a constant direction. Constant ...

 is used as a heuristic for segmentation, the pen-tip trajectory

Trajectory

A trajectory is the path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass...

 can be subdivided into segments corresponding to ballistic stroke

Ballistic stroke

In handwriting research, the concept of stroke is used in various ways. In engineering and computer science, there is a tendency to use the term stroke for a single connected component of ink or a complete pen-down trace . Thus, such stroke may be a complete character or a part of a character...

s.

In handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...

 or optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

, other terminologies may be used, such as the term glyph

Glyph

A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

for a non-character (i.e.: sub character or
multi-character) pattern.