Abstract. Text/graphics separation aims at segmenting the document into two layers: a layer assumed to contain text and a layer containing graphical objects. In this paper, we present a consolidation of a method proposed by Fletcher and Kasturi, with a number of improvements to make it more suitable for graphics-rich documents. We discuss the right choice of thresholds for this method, and their stability. We also propose a post-processing step for retrieving text components touching the graphics, through local segmentation of the distance skeleton.