A handwritten test symbol, such as an alphabetic character, a word or a signature, written on a digitizing tablet is normalized by comparison with a model symbol to determine the transformation necessary to best fit the test symbol to the model symbol. Such transformation is then applied to normalize the test symbol. Shape information in the test symbol is preserved during such normalization. In accordance with one aspect of the invention, the model symbol is a line segment. In accordance with another aspect of the invention, the model symbol is an example of the symbol being normalized. Such normalization can be used as a preprocessing step in applications such as character recognition, text recognition or signature verification.