HowTo_FootSepLine

How to insert a separator between text area and footer

The KOMA-Script classes provide the footsepline option to switch on a separator between the text area and the footer in page style headings, myheadings or plain:

\documentclass[footsepline]{scrbook}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blinddocument
\end{document}

As can be seen in the example, the separator is also inserted on the first page of a chapter, although it is not set in the page style headings, but in the style plain. This difference to headsepline makes sense, because in all three styles the classes do only the pagination in the footer, that is, they set the page number.

If, on the other hand, you insist on omitting the separator on these pages, the package scrlayer-scrpage is required, which only takes over the setting of footsepline with the additional option plainfootsepline also for pages in the style plain:

\documentclass[footsepline]{scrbook}
\usepackage[automark]{scrlayer-scrpage}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blinddocument
\end{document}

As you can see from the example, it is better to set the separator even with scrlayer-scrpage, if you stick to the default settings regarding the content of the footer:

\documentclass[footsepline]{scrbook}
\usepackage[automark,plainfootsepline]{scrlayer-scrpage}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blinddocument
\end{document}

If you want to change the thickness of the line, you should also use the scrlayer-scrpage package. With this package you can, for example, pass values for the thickness of the line to the footsepline option. The length and orientation of the line can also be influenced by the package. For more details see the manual.

A side effect of using the separator is that the footer is automatically considered to be part of the type area. This has optical reasons and is explained in detail in the manual.