The dashrule package makes it easy to draw a huge variety of dashed rules (i.e., lines) in LaTeX. dashrule provides a command, \hdashrule, which is a cross between LaTeX's \rule and PostScript's setdash command. \hdashrule draws horizontally dashed rules using the same syntax as \rule, but with an additional, setdash-like parameter that specifies the pattern of dash segments and the space between those segments. Because dashrule's rules are constructed internally using \rule (as opposed to, e.g., PostScript \specials) they are fully compatible with every LaTeX back-end processor.

The author is Scott Pakin.