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(I am OP) I thought about doing it that way but found that handwriting recognition was pretty weak as of now and wanted to try something solid. The reason is, usually, handwriting recognition would take into account the following characters (it doesn't recognize individual characters at a time, it looks at a database of handwritten whole words). That would be the ideal if done well, of course.

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I have no experience with handwriting recognition, but intuitively it seems like the facts that:

a) the grammar for chess move notation is fairly limited; and

b) each move must be valid relative to the current game state

can be used as contextual clues to resolve ambiguous characters. Of course, this means you can't use an off-the-shelf handwriting recognition package that recognizes whole words like you describe, but requires a custom per-character recognizer. (But then, isn't that what you're doing already?)

Now that I think about it, you're right. I don't know what the accuracy would be like, but it's certainly possible and worth a try.

Also, a slight problem with b) is that it must be in the context of the whole game, since incorrect moves may only arise later on. This makes it harder with characters too ofc

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