Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a famous algorithm to compare two mono- stroke symbols online.It obeys boundary and continuity constraints and possesses high recognition rate.The extension of DTW to multi-stroke symbols raises specific problems.A naive solution is to convert the multi- stroke symbol into a single one via a direct concatenation in the handwriting order.However,people may write a symbol in different stroke di-rections and orders.The application of a brute force method by searching all the possible directions and orders leads to prohibitive calculation times.To reduce the searching complexity,DTW A * algorithm,which keeps the continuity constraint during each partial matching and reduces the searching complexity by using the A * al-gorithm,is proposed and is then tested on a flowchart dataset containing multi- stroke symbols.The results indi-cate that DTW A * algorithm helps to achieve the highest recognition rate and stability,as compared with such two other algorithms as DTW and modified Hausdorff distance.