Offline handwriting recognition has become lately a very popular research area and the number of its possible application is very large. Most recognition system are based on modeling characters to recognize, then the concatenation of these models to recognize a word, while modeling character allows deformations related to its context. This paper provides a survey of handwritten recognition systems based on context-dependent character modeling to account possible deformations related to its context. It examines the literature on the most significant work in contextual handwritten text recognition for two different alphabets, Latin and Arabic. Finally discussing the comparative results to achieve a comprehensive summary of the various approaches and systems taking account the character's context which could help open up some interesting new prospects.