Remove Automatic Inserted Horizontal Line in LibreOffice Writer

This tutorial will show you how to remove or turn off automatically inserted horizontal lines in your LibreOffice Writer documents.

If you’ve the auto-correction feature enabled in LibreOffice Writer, typing certain characters multiple times and pressing Enter in the keyboard will automatically insert a wide horizontal line under the paragraph.

These formatting features, also known as the auto-correction work with several characters, such as underscores, dashes, asterisks, and hyphens, among others. Once added, these lines can be challenging to remove without knowing how they were inserted automatically without telling LibreOffice to do so.

Turning Off Auto-Correction Feature From Option

To stop LibreOffice from automatically adding lines under paragraphs, simply turn off the auto-correct feature in the options menu.

Step 1: Go to Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoCorrect Options from the top menu bar. This will open the AutoCorrect options dialog box, where you can adjust the settings and disable automatic formatting.

If you have enabled the Tabbed User Interface in LibreOffice Writer, you can access the menu bar by clicking the leftmost button on the ribbon.

Step 2: To turn off automatic formatting in LibreOffice Writer, navigate to the Options tab and uncheck both checkboxes for Automatic *bold*, /italic/, -strikeout- and _underline_.

This will disable the automatic insertion of horizontal lines under every paragraphs when you type certain characters multiple time and press Enter.

Step 3: Click OK to save the changes.

Now, when you type certain characters (dashes, hyphens, or underlines) for multiple times that would otherwise trigger automatic formatting, LibreOffice Writer will no longer respond to that trigger and add a line under the paragraph.

Remove Sticky Horizontal Line From Paragraph

If you’ve a document that already contains several automatically added horizontal lines under many paragraphs, and you are having difficulty removing them, you do not need to delete the document and start over. Instead, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Place the cursor inside the paragraph where the horizontal line was inserted and right-click to open the context menu.

From the context menu, select Paragraph > Paragraph to open the Paragraph Style dialog. In the dialog window, navigate to the Borders tab.

Under the Line section, click on the Style: drop-down list and select None. Finally, click OK to remove the horizontal line from the selected paragraph. You’re done! The automatically added horizontal line under the paragraph should now be removed.