What is the difference between OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR?

Both technologies are very similar, but OCR is already in an advanced state, whereas HTR is still in an early phase. Unlike OCR, HTR does not focus on individual letters. Instead, it scans and processes the image of entire lines and tries to decode this data. The main difference from the user’s point of view is that the stage of Layout Analysis/Segmentation is integrated into the OCR engine, whereas it is a separate step in the workflow for HTR.