3. The method of claim 2 further comprising the step of estimating an intra-word separation from said handwritten text using the projecting of boundaries of the word segment regions lying on said lines of text.
3. The method of claim 2 further comprising the step of estimating an intra-word separation from said handwritten text using the projecting of boundaries of the word segment regions lying on said lines of text. 4. The method of claim 3 wherein determined boundary points on connected component regions are as points that have at least one "off" neighbor and wherein said curves are smoothed using a conventional line-segment approximation algorithm.