Text recognition in OpenCV?

edit

So, here is the thing. I have written a license plate detection program and it works fine. Now, the next step is to recognize license plate number. I researched a lot and found out OCR is a great tool but then the results i get from OCR is not really that great. It fails miserably with some images and in some it does reasonably well. I would like to keep my options open. So, i researched a bit more and came across template matching. I applied it on images (not for recognizing texts) and its pretty robust. So, i want to get some idea about text recognition in images. What are my possible options? Lets say at some point i would like to try Handwriting recognition.