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}

Answer 1

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.