The recognition of unconstrained handwriting has to cope with the ambiguity and variability of cursive script. Preprocessing techniques are often applied to on-line data before representing the script as basic primitives, resulting in the propagation of errors introduced during pre-processing. This paper therefore combines pre-processing of the data (i.e. tangential smoothing) and encoding into primitives (Partial Strokes) in a single step. Finding the correct character at the correct place (i.e. letter spotting) is the main problem in non-holistic recognition approaches. Many cursive letters are composed of common shapes of varying complexity that can in turn consist of other sub-shapes. In this paper, we present a production rule system using Hierarchical Fuzzy Inference in order to exploit this hierarchical property of cursive script. Shapes of increasing complexity are found on a page of handwriting until letters are finally spotted. Zoning is then applied to verify their vertical position.