8.4.8 Wide Characters

Fixed width fonts in most countries have characters of the same width. Some countries, however, use Latin characters mixed with wider characters--most notable East Asian countries.

The problem is that when formatting, Gnus assumes that if a string is 10 characters wide, it'll be 10 Latin characters wide on the screen. In these countries, that's not true.

To help fix this, you can set gnus-use-correct-string-widths to t. This makes buffer generation slower, but the results will be prettier. The default value under XEmacs is t but nil for Emacs.