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From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
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Subject: Re: Buffers menu question
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 15:16:29 -0600 (MDT)
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    Think about it:  your attempt to make a constant width field will
    involve something like the characters `*', `%', and SPC, all of which
    are different widths -- and you don't even know the widths (not that
    would do you much good if you did).

Just because the solution is not certain to work does not mean it
won't work well enough in practice.  In the past in some contexts I
saw that many punctuation characters had the same width as space in
many fonts.

It may be possible to pick pairs of alternate characters that give
good results in most real cases.