This paper review the state of the art in o#-line Roman cursive han dw iting recognition. The input provided to an o#-line han iting recognition system is an image of a digit, aw ord, or - more generally - some text, and the system produces, as output, an ASCII transcription of the input. This taskinvolves a number of processing steps, some of w ich are quite di#cult. Typically, preprocessing, normalization, feature extraction, classification, and postprocessing operations are required. We'll survey the state of the art, analyze recent trends, and try to identify challenges for future research in this field.