International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research Nabeel Ashraf, Syed Yasser Arafat, Muhammad Javed Iqbal 10 3 2019 https://doi.org/10.6025/jcl/2019/10/3/81-91 http://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v10n3/jclv10n3_3.pdf This survey paper presents a comprehensive study of Urdu Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methodologies. The main focus of the study is detail investigation of the techniques used to recognize the Nastaliq, Naskh and other similar scripts fonts. These script fonts are used to write Urdu, Arabic, Pashto and Sindhi etc. languages. Several methods of text recognition and classification of Urdu like cursive scripts are discussed. The survey contains the comparison and description of each method in a brief way which identifies handwritten, printed and online text recognition as well. For each optical character recognition (OCR) the phases of pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification and finally recognition are discussed. After the comprehensive analysis of all methodologies critics and future work in Urdu cursive scripts, i.e. Naskh and Nastaliq scripts are also proposed.