Arabic characters differ significantly from other characters, such as Latin and Chinese characters, in that they are written cursively

in both printed and handwritten forms, and consist of 28 main characters. However, most of their shapes change according to their

position in the word. These shapes, together with some other secondaries, raise the number of classes to 120. Furthermore, some of

these characters have the same shape but are distinguished by the presence of one, two or three dots above or below them. In this

paper, words are first segmented into characters and secondaries are removed using newly developed algorithms. This reduced the

number of classes