1. A method of grouping scanned handwritten word text line segments to generate handwritten words for the recognition and indexing of documents, said method comprising the steps of: generating at least one connected component region of said handwritten word text segments wherein centroid and dominant orientation are identified, said centroid being the first order moments of said region, and said dominant orientation being determined by the direction of the moment of inertia axis of a region; selecting peaks in a histogram of said dominant orientation which represent major word orientations in said handwritten word; conducting distance computation of said connected component regions through along-line inter-region determination; determining curve and corner features from said connected regions by a plurality of boundary points on connected component regions; and developing intra-word text segment groupings.