In this paper we propose a novel approach to the detec- tion of on-line handwritten text lines based on dynamic pro- gramming. We try to find the paths with the minimum cost between two consecutive text lines. Most steps of the pro- posed algorithm are based on off-line information. Hence the method can also be applied to off-line documents af- ter a few minor changes. In our experiments we show that this dynamic programming based approach is better than a common on-line segmentation procedure.