1. A method for online character recognition of East Asian characters, implemented at least in part by a computing device, the method comprising: acquiring time sequential, online ink data for a handwritten East Asian character; conditioning the ink data to produce conditioned ink data where the conditioned ink data comprises information as to writing sequence of the handwritten East Asian character; extracting features from the conditioned ink data wherein the features comprise a tangent feature, a curvature feature, a local length feature, a connection point feature and an imaginary stroke feature; and training a Hidden Markov Model based character recognition system using the extracted features.