Writer recognition based on peculiarity of hand-writing is an important aspect of any forensic analysis. We present an approach for selecting best discriminative primitives for writer recognition. After selecting the primitives we also propose a hybrid system by combining both writer recognition and handwriting recognition for improved accuracy. We have also validated the performance of selected primitives on publically available dataset. We have performed this study on the Devanagri script. Experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed franework. © 2013 IEEE.