table

[harven]

 I am trying to build a text-based table under emacs 22.1 stable. I
want to change the characters used to draw the borders of the table.

>From the emacs manual, I have to set a few
variables:
(setq table-cell-intersection-char ?\u2504B)
(table-cell-vertical-char ?\u2503)
(setq table-cell-horizontal-chars ?\u2501)

Everything is fine for the two first variables, but
it doesn' t work for the last.
I had a look at the table.el file. There is only
one place where table-cell-horizontal-char
is mentioned, at the very beginning. The variable
used thereafter is table-cell-intersection-chars
and contains a string instead of a character.

(setq table-cell-horizontal-chars "\u2501")
finally worked for me but I am still wondering
what's going on there. Any hint ?

By the way, the table-capture command
uses a weird way of handling defaults
settings:

Column delimiter regexp : default-value

The default value is entered at the prompt.
This makes pretty difficult to put table-capture
in a macro. Each time the macro is executed,
the default-value is added again:

Column delimiter regexp : default-value default-value default-
value ...

IMHO it would have been better if the defaults
have been implemented using syntax like
Column-delimiter-regexp (default : default-value) :