Re: Unfortunate pixel width of one TAB

[Florian Weimer]

* Markus Gritsch:

> Richard Stallman wrote:
>>     When using a proportional font the pixel width of one TAB is
>> "tab-width     times average_char_pixel_width".  When editing files
>> which contain tabs     and spaces for indenting, this leads to some
>> bad alignment.
>>     If would be nice if the pixel width of one TAB could be set to
>> something     like "tab-width times space_pixel_width".
>> Do you mean, the width of a space in the current font?
>> That seems like the right behavior for it.
>
> Yes, exactly.  The pixel width of a space of the currently used font 
> should be taken into account.  As a workaround, I am currently lying to 
> Emacs about the font I use.  Normally I would specify
>   "-*-Bitstream Vera Sans-normal-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*"
> but to get the pixel width of a tab right I have to use
>   "-*-Bitstream Vera Sans-normal-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-40-iso8859-*".

This seems to happen in my case with the monospaced version:

-bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--12-116-74-75-m-70-iso8859-1

I'm still using the Emacs release version:

GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 
2004-10-16 on raven, modified by Debian

Is this a bug in Emacs or in the font metrics?