Drawing Horizontal Lines in LaTeX

Posted: 15th August 2009 by Tim in LaTeX
Tags: , , , , , ,
13

Lines can be drawin in LaTeX using the \line function. This takes an x-slope, y-slope and length like so:

\line(x-slope,y-slope){length}

To draw a horizontal line (or horizontal rule), set the x-slope to 1 and the y-slope to zero.

Depending on the margins which have been set, a length of 450 will draw a line which is the width of the page (minus the margins).

If you’re looking for a clean line to divide the page, try the following:

\begin{center}
\line(1,0){250}
\end{center}

  1. Drawing a line in LaTeX « Realsuddenlike says:
    October 9, 2010 at 11:32 pm

    [...] line in a presentation for a in-lecture “fill-in-the-blank”. I found the link http://timmurphy.org/2009/08/15/drawing-horizontal-lines-in-latex/. Basically, all you have to do [...]

  2. Kristofer Bergstrom says:
    March 2, 2011 at 12:27 pm

    Hello Tim. Thank you for this tip. I get an error when I try your snippet in a LaTeX article documentclass I’m creating. Does the \line command need to be called within a picture block? Or perhaps I need to include a particular package with \usepackage?

  3. cw says:
    March 24, 2011 at 11:14 pm

    Works great. Thanks!

  4. Zach says:
    April 23, 2011 at 12:25 pm

    Thanks! Works great.

  5. Simon says:
    May 10, 2011 at 9:20 pm

    Thanks! :-D

  6. Jay says:
    July 4, 2011 at 3:05 am

    Thanks.
    It works great.
    I just wanted to create line for putting signature.

  7. ????? » Blog Archive » ??? ???? ???? ?? Latex says:
    August 10, 2011 at 6:44 am

    [...] Latex ????? ???? ?? ??????? ???? ???? line ????? ???. ??? ???? ?? ??????? ??????? ?? ????? ????? ????? [...]

  8. Fiona says:
    August 19, 2011 at 8:48 pm

    Hi, this is great, thanks. Do you know how to get a double horizonal line please? Just to tart it up a bit… Thanks!

  9. Tim says:
    August 27, 2011 at 7:12 am

    Hi Kristofer,
    No picture environment or packages required. Here’s an example of an entire document with a line in it:
    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    \line(1,0){250}
    \end{document}

  10. teodor says:
    October 7, 2011 at 11:54 pm

    Excellent solution! Also works within a math environment

  11. Katarina says:
    October 21, 2011 at 1:44 am

    Thank you?
    And what if I want to change the color and the thickness of the line? Which additional commands can I use?

    Thank you in advance

    Katarina

  12. Tim says:
    October 21, 2011 at 6:41 am

    Hi Katarina,

    To change the line thickness you can use something like \linethickness{2mm} before the \line command.

    To change the color, see this post.

    -T

  13. Tim says:
    October 22, 2011 at 4:49 am

    Hi Fiona,

    You can create yourself a definition for this (note: the blank lines matter here!):

    \def\doubleline{

        \vspace{-0.9em}
        \hspace{\fill}\line(1,0){240}\hspace{\fill}

        \vspace{-0.9em}
        \hspace{\fill}\line(1,0){250}\hspace{\fill}

    }

    You can then put this in your document by adding \doubleline (the first \vspace in the definition may or may not be needed, depending on what you’re doing).