The method herein proposed detects text lines on handwritten pages which may include either lines oriented in several directions, erasures, or annotationsbetween main lines. The method has a hypothesis-validation strategy which is iteratively activated until the end of the segmentation is reached. At each stage of the process, the best text-line hypothesis is generated in the Hough domain. taking into account the fluctuations of the text-line components. Afterwards, the validity of the line is checked in the image domain using a proximity criteria which analyses the context in which is perceived the alignment hypothesed. Ambiguous components belonging to several text lines are also marked.