This paper presents the investigations carried out in improving the performance of a holistic cursive word recogniser using approximating splines. The holistic cursive word recogniser and the spline based zone line extraction mechanism are described. A series of tests are carried out using 3600 word images from 18 writes and a 200 word lexicon to compare the performance of the histogram based zone extraction with that of the spline based approach and the results are presented. It is found that the spline based zone extraction significantly improves the recognition results. The future directions of the research for further improvement of recognition performance are presented.