Several dissimilarity measures for binary vectors are formulated and examined for their recognition capability in handwriting identification for which the binary micro-features are used to characterize handwritten character shapes. Pertaining to eight dissimilarity measures, i.e., Jaccard-Needham, Dice, Correlation, Yule, Russell-Rao, Sokal-Michener, Rogers-Tanmoto and Kulzinsky, the discriminary power of ten individual characters and their combination is exhaustively studied. Conclusions are made on how to choose a dissimilarity measure and how to combine hybrid features.