This paper presents a robust method for handwritten text line extraction. We use morphological dilation with a dynamic adaptive mask for line extraction. Line separation occurs because of the repulsion and attraction between connected components. The characteristics of the Arabic script are considered to ensure a high performance of the algorithm. Our method is evaluated on the CENPARMI Arabic handwritten documents database which contains multi-skewed and touching lines. With a matching score

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... 0.95, our method achieved precision and recall rates of 96.3% and 96.7% respectively, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.