How to draw a line between two paragraphs of my text?

How does this look:

alt text

Whilst I generally favour TikZ for anything vaguely graphical, this was achieved with a simple \rule:

\documentclass{article}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]

\noindent\rule[0.5ex]{\linewidth}{1pt}

\lipsum[2]

\end{document}

You can thicken the line by changing the 1pt to something else (or make it thinner, I guess). Perhaps style purists would want to change the before and after spacing a little.

(Added in edit: in the comments, Style Purist Will recommends adding a little height, and as it's so easy to do - I'd forgotten about the optional argument, myself - I thought it worth adding in the demonstration. He also used \linewidth rather than \textwidth - my original choice - which is a little more robust as it will vary correctly in lists and other environments where the linewidth can get altered.)


In ConTeXt, \blackrule gives a horizontal line. By default, the width of the line 1em wide and 1ex tall. The width, height, and depth are changed using the respective options. For example:

\blackrule[width=\hsize, height=1pt, depth=0.5ex]
  • Despite its name, \blackrule also draws colored rules.

    \blackrule[color=red]
    
  • \setupblackrules specifies the options for all \blackrules.

  • As a bonus, \blackrules (notice the plural) draws multiple horizontal rules. For example:

    \blackrules[n=6, width=\hsize, distance=0.5ex]
    

    draws 6 rules separated by a distance of 0.5ex.


This is more for myself, but I just used \hrule where I was trying to use \hline in text mode a document, since of course a line is never as simple as just a line. That's LaTeX.