how to recognise handwriting and convert into text? I'm trying to develop a project that recognises handwriting and converts into text. What are the algorithms and tools to be used?
What you described sounds to me like Optical Character Recognition(OCR). 

If you want to implement your own, I would say read through how an open source OCR like Tesseract was implemented. 

Otherwise just google for OCR and you will find a list of OCR engines, both comercial and open-source. To list but a few: 


Tesseract: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
Matlab Computer Vision Toolbox's OCR: http://www.mathworks.de/de/help/vision/ref/ocr.html


Most OCRs makes use of a combination of a segmantation and image classification(usually done with Convolutional Neural Networks). 

See here for more information.