How to recognize cursive english handwriting in an image?

Our aim is to extract different features from the given handwriting for handwriting analysis. For this the initial step is to recognize the individual characters by segmentation process. But while recognition of characters the properties we need like slant, intensity of pixels are being removed.And features like the dot of the letter 'I' and the letters which are written very lightly by the person are also removed while the conversion of the image takes place. So is it possible to pre-process and recognize the alphabets without removing these features??