In this paper an on-line single-stroke recognition method based on fuzzy logic is introduced. Each of the characters is defined by only one nine dimensional fuzzy rule. In addition to the low resource requirement the solution is able to satisfy many of the user's current demands in handwriting recognizers, like speed and learning. Eight of the nine features are extracted using a four-by-four grid. For the learning phase we designed a new punish/reward bacterial evolutionary algorithm which tunes the character parameters represented by fuzzy sets. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.