One or more techniques and/or systems are disclosed for constructing a compact handwriting character classifier. A precision constrained Gaussian model (PCGM) based handwriting classifier is trained by estimating parameters for the PCGM under minimum classification error (MCE) criterion, such as by using a computer-based processor. The estimated parameters of the trained PCGM classifier are compressed using split vector quantization (VQ) (e.g., and in some embodiments, scalar quantization) to compact the handwriting recognizer in computer-based memory.