A quick visual guide to creating table cells with diagonal lines in LaTeX

There are many packages in LaTeX that help with table creation – booktabs is a popular example—and there are also a growing number of automatic table generators now available online (such as this one) which are a great way to create the LaTeX code for a table without having to type it out manually. There's even a package to help you create really long tables that span multiple pages! But what if you want to add some additional styling or formatting to certain cells within your tables?

The simple answer is that there's usually a package for it! Here we focus on one particular piece of cell formatting—how to create table cells with diagonal lines. These diagonal lines often used in the upper-left corner of a table to allow both row and column headers to be placed in that same cell, and there are two similar packages that can be used to achieve this: slashbox and diagbox.

To help you try this out, we've added a short example which demonstrates how to produce diagonal lines in table cells using those packages. Some people prefer to use diagbox because the lines produced by slashbox can be more jagged, while the diagbox lines are smoother; however, we've included options for both in the example so you can decide for yourself!

In addition, we've recorded an animated GIF showing how to add the file slashbox.sty to your project directly from the CTAN repository.

We hope this helps, and if you'd like to see more animated GIF tutorials please let us know.