1. A method for operating a handwriting recognition system, comprising the steps of: receiving, from a handwriting transducer means, x-y coordinate information generated by a writer; extracting temporally-based feature vectors from the x-y coordinate information; extracting spatially-based feature vectors from the x-y coordinate information; and identifying a most probable character (U) from a set of possible characters (a) as being a character that is written by the writer, the step of identifying employing a probabilistic method that considers both the temporally-based feature vectors and the spatially-based feature vectors in accordance with the expression EQU Pr(U.vertline.a.sub.j)=Pr(U.sub.t .vertline.a.sub.j).sup.1/2 Pr(U.sub.d .vertline.a.sub.j)1/2, where Pr(U.sub.d .vertline.a.sub.j) is determined from the spatially-based feature vectors and where Pr(U.sub.t .vertline.a.sub.j) is determined from the temporally-based feature vectors.