Spacing out

[Frank Solensky <frank solensky org>]

I'm running into something that's either a bug or feature. I'm trying to
determine which it is and how to proceed from here.

Ximian Evolution uses Pango to display email message bodies.  When the
body of a message includes consecutive spaces (U+0020), the rendering
code converts all but one to a non-breaking space (U+00A0).  The problem
that I'm running into is when reading an email message that includes
either tables or ASCII art, both are often misaligned, sometimes badly
(see also http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=47713).  As far as
I've been able to chase this down within the rendering code, the display
box for U+00A0 is often one pixel thinner and one pixel taller than
U+0020 in many fixed-width fonts.

What I'm wondering is if this is the expected behavior and, if so, is
there some simple change I can make to the calling programs to get it to
display as expected? 

FWIW: it appears that PCF fonts are getting displayed as expected,
TrueType and Postscript fixed-width fonts are misaligned.