This paper describes a compact on-line/off-line combined handwriting recognizer for Japanese characters. Conventional combined recognizers mainly consider the recognition accuracy, though recognition speed and memory size are important as well. Especially, the off-line method requires a large prototype dictionary, and therefore the on-line/off-line combined recognizers are difficult to use practically in a small computer. In order to tackle this problem, we propose an on-line/offline combined recognizer where an off-line recognizer is composed of the Modified Quadratic Discriminant Function whose dictionary size is significantly reduced. Moreover, its on-line recognizer is composed of a structured character pattern representation (SCPR) dictionary which reduces the total size of memory and Linear-time Elastic Matching (LTM) which reduces the computation time. Experimental results show that the cumulative recognition rate of top 5 candidates of a proposed 1MB dictionary is 97.3% (almost the same as that of a conventional 90MB dictionary) and that the recognition speed of the 1MB dictionary is 1.75 times faster then that of the 90MB dictionary.