What is a good handwriting recognition software?

Solution 1:

Tesseract.

From Wikipedia:

It was originally developed as proprietary software at Hewlett-Packard between 1985 until 1995. After ten years without any development taking place, Hewlett Packard and UNLV released it as open source in 2005. Tesseract is currently developed by Google and released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Tesseract is considered one of the most accurate free software OCR engines currently available

The drawback is that it only processes tiff file, maybe you can use other convertor to convert pdf to tiff and let Tesseract does the job.