Drawing Horizontal Lines in LaTeX

Posted: 15th August 2009 by Tim in LaTeX
Tags: , , , , , ,
14

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).

  14. Linnea says:
    March 22, 2012 at 7:19 am

    Thank you so much! Just what I needed!