Can I insert a ruled line in Writer?

Is there any way to insert a ruled line (as opposed to a repeated underline) in Writer?

The answer appears to be that there is no ruled line capability in LO. Thanks to those who replied.

You didn’t mention your purpose. If you want a continuous leader line between a word and another one inside a paragraph, define a tab stop with “fill character”. A dot gives the usual leader line, underscore are used without spacing => continuous line. Any character can be used as “fill”.

As it turns out, there is a way to do this. Under LO writer help, look for “drawing lines in text”. The directions are quite clear.

Caveat! If you insert graphic lines (i.e. not borders around a paragraph), they will be anchored usually to page and won’t follow text edition. This is why the “border” method or built-in Horizontal Line paragraph style is preferable.

If the answer solves your question please tick the :heavy_check_mark:.

Hello @sarasdad,

To insert a ruled line in your Writer document, you could just type three or more minus ( “-” ) characters and then press ENTER.

For a thick line, type three or more underscore characters ( “_” ) and then press ENTER.

NB. To remove these ruled lines again, place the cursor before the line and press CTRL+M.

HTH, lib

This works; but you need to turn on the APPLY BORDER on the AutoCorrect.

@librebel’s answer is based on AutoCorrect and may depend on locale (e.g. 3-underscore does work in my locale). Moreover it may be disabled.

Basically, there is no such object as a ruled line in LO. The workaround offered by the 3-hyphen entry is to modify the Borders property of the paragraph (which must contain only the 3+ hyphens). You can mimic this method and apply it to any paragraph, controlling yourself line thickness, position, color, etc. from the Borders tab in the paragraph style definition dialog.

Eventually, create a specific paragraph style (intended to be used empty) for the purpose of ruled line with specific spacing above/below and left/right margins.