Vertical lines in latex using orgtbl in emacs

Question

I am trying to write a document in latex using emacs as an editor and I like being able to use orgtbl-mode to insert and edit tables "ascii art style", but I am annoyed at having to manually change the format of the tabular from {lll} to {|l|l|l|} whenever making changes to the table and compiling.

Is there a way to make having horizontal lines the default?

Example table:

|-------+-------+-------|
|       | test1 | test2 |
|-------+-------+-------|
| test3 |       |       |
|-------+-------+-------|
| test4 |       |       |
|-------+-------+-------|

I want this to output the following table.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
\hline
& test1 & test2 \\
\hline
test3 &  &  \\
\hline
test4 &  &  \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

and not this table:

\begin{tabular}{lll}
\hline
& test1 & test2 \\
\hline
test3 &  &  \\
\hline
test4 &  &  \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

I realize now that I wrote horizontal in the topic when I really meant vertical! — Metareven, Feb 15 '16 at 13:47

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 11 '16 at 16:10

You can use column groups from the Org manual.

Adding a line and a column (indicating the column groups)

| / | <     | <     | <>    |
|---+-------+-------+-------|
|   |       | test1 | test2 |
|---+-------+-------+-------|
|   | test3 |       |       |
|---+-------+-------+-------|
|   | test4 |       |       |
|---+-------+-------+-------|

will generate the desired result:

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
\hline
 & test1 & test2\\
\hline
test3 &  & \\
\hline
test4 &  & \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

The first column is added to get the vertical line on the far left of the table, and the ‘>’ indicating the end of a column in the last column of the first line is necessary to get the vertical line on the far right of the table.

Vertical lines in latex using orgtbl in emacs

1 Answers1