handWritten letters (digits 0-9) ,classifier and cursive segmentation


hello author,
1.
how I implement hand written OCR (digit classifier) ?
how I feed the ANN with defined data set (MNIST or else) ?
2. 
cursive letter segmentation, can you point on segmentation algorithm for cursive, means
isolate connected letters 
can I do it with this ANN either ?

any code example or link will help


