How do I insert a horizontal line?

Question

Level 1

8 points

How do I insert a horizontal line?

I'm looking for a feature similar to MS Word's horizontal line that is automatically inserted when you type 3 hyphens in a row: ---

The line is light and spans the width of the page. Can this be done in Pages?

Thanks!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 3, 2008 3:27 PM

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Answer 1

Walt K

Level 4

2,946 points

Mar 3, 2008 5:55 PM in response to hobodave

A series of em dashes, created the same way as the underscore, might give you what you want. (Shift, Option, Hyphen) The effect may vary with the typeface and/or point size. Try it and see.

Walt

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Answer 2

DennisG

Level 5

6,520 points

Mar 3, 2008 4:09 PM in response to hobodave

Dave,

Welcome to Apple discussions.

It's possible to get what you want, but you'll have to make it manually the first time. Here's how: in your document, hit a bunch of underline characters so that it stretches across the page. Select and copy to clipboard. Open Pages Preferences > Auto-correction. Click on the plus sign to create a new auto-correction. In the Replace field, put three hyphens. In the With field, paste in your underline characters, then click away from that field. Close preferences. Go back to your document. On a blank line, type your three hyphens, then a space. It should expand to a horizontal line across the page.

-Dennis

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Answer 3

hobodave Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 3, 2008 4:19 PM in response to DennisG

Thanks for the feedback Dennis. Unfortunately this isn't the desired behavior that I want. The problem with this approach is that it is only a line of underscores that go along the bottom of the text row.

Here are two examples of what I don't want it to look like:

1) Using underscores - as you can see they are well below the HEADING

HEADING
_____

2) Using hyphens - closer to the heading, but still too low, and disjointed.

HEADING
-------

3) I can't provide an example of this using text on the forums, but using the underline functionality and extending it to the end of the line is not the desired behavior either, as it is actually on the same line as the HEADING.

Basically I guess I want a row of 'overscores' (sic) across the page.

Not possible?

Thanks again.

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Answer 4

DennisG

Level 5

6,520 points

Mar 3, 2008 4:29 PM in response to hobodave

If you really want control over thickness and placement of the line, click on the Objects icon > Shapes > Line. If you turn off Wrap, you can place it as close to text as you want, stretch it to whatever length you need, and even thin it out. If you had a program like TextExpander, you could have it handy whenever you need it. But to do so without an expansion app would mean you'd have to create a template with the line already in it. That's not a bad option either.

-Dennis

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Answer 5

hobodave Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 3, 2008 4:20 PM in response to hobodave

Haha. The forums turned my row of hyphens into a solid line! That's basically what I want within Pages. 🙂

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Answer 6

hobodave Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 3, 2008 4:32 PM in response to DennisG

Thanks Dennis.

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