Writer identification is important for forensic analysis, helping experts to deliberate on the authenticity of documents. The general objective of the ICFHR 2012 Writer Identification Contest is to record recent advances in the field of writer identification using established evaluation performance measures. Challenge 1 of the contest deals specifically with Latin scripts. The benchmarking dataset of challenge 1 of the contest was created with the help of 100 writers that were asked to copy four parts of text in two languages (English and Greek). This paper describes the contest details for this challenge including the evaluation measures used as well as the performance of the seven submitted methods along with a short description of each method.