Book excerpt: This Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts is the first book of its kind, specifically devoted to this emerging field. Topics and features: contains contributions from the leading researchers in the field; with a Foreword by Professor Bente Maegaard of the University of Copenhagen; presents a detailed overview of Arabic character recognition technology, covering a range of different aspects of pre-processing and feature extraction; reviews a broad selection of varying approaches, including HMM-based methods and a recognition system based on multidimensional recurrent neural networks; examines the evaluation of Arabic script recognition systems, discussing data collection and annotation, benchmarking strategies, and handwriting recognition competitions; describes numerous applications of Arabic script recognition technology, from historical Arabic manuscripts to online Arabic recognition.