Paper often includes pre-printed ruling lines to help people write more neatly. This particular example of realworld noise can have a serious impact on applications such as handwriting recognition and writer identification, however. In this work, we investigate the effects of ruling lines on writer ID. We study a method for detecting and removing ruling lines and test its utility for Arabic writer identification through a series of experiments. Our preliminary results show that under realistic

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... ssumptions where ruling lines are expected to have different properties across the collection, e.g., thickness, spacing, etc., removing them significantly improves identification performance. We conclude with a discussion of work-in-progress to examine followup questions raised by our initial investigations.