bug#25621: 25.1; IPA chars problematic in orgmode table

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  25621@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2017 13:54:48 +0100
> 
> I can reproduce the "strange results", i.e. bad column alignment in the
> table, in current master with -Q but not with my initializations.  The
> crucial difference is the font used: with -Q it is this:
> 
> "-unknown-Liberation Mono-normal-normal-normal-*-15-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1"
> 
> and with my initializations it's this:
> 
> "-unknown-DejaVu Sans Mono-normal-normal-normal-*-12-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1"
> 
> If I start with -Q, do `M-x set-frame-font' and enter the latter font,
> and then carry out the above recipe, the table columns are all correctly
> aligned.
> 
> I noticed that the alignment was already not completely correct before
> executing `C-c C-x \': some characters have a narrower width, e.g. the
> character #x2c8 (MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE) in the second column of
> the second row.  With my initializations this character is displayed in
> the same font as the default font listed above, but with -Q it is
> displayed in a different font from the default font:
> 
> "-unknown-DejaVu Serif-normal-italic-normal-*-15-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1"

Thanks for investigating this.

Yes, Emacs will try to use the default font for punctuation and symbol
characters, unless the default font fails to support them; then Emacs
will look for a font that does.  If that font is a variable-pitch
font, you will get mis-alignment, if the mode which produces the table
uses whitespace for alignment, and not pixel-granular display
properties.

This is normal, and not a bug.

The solution is to fix your font configuration (e.g., via fontsets
inside Emacs, or by installing/uninstalling fonts).