Special characters change the width of trailing/leading space character in Gedit (and medit)

[Tao Rich]

If I paste a special character - say from the Character Map - into Gedit or medit in Ubuntu 16.04 into the middle of a line, then the space characters directly after the special character display with a "compressed" character spacing until the behaviour is "interrupted" by a standard text character.

So the basic problem result is that the uniform monospacing of characters gets out of alignment on lines above and below the lines with the special character problem.

I posted a detailed question on AskUbuntu and the prevailing opinion was that I should log a bug report.
Another user with different versions was easily able to reproduce the same issue .

https://askubuntu.com/questions/986258/why-do-special-characters-change-spacing-following-space-character-in-gedit-or-m

Please see that post for full details, worked example, and screenshots.

Additional comments:

* As stated above:
- running Ubuntu 16.04

* This affects:
- Gedit 3.18.3
- medit 1.2.0

I am aware that it is thus not strictly a gedit issue, and probably affects multiple Gnome editors under multiple Linux variants - but Gedit is my favourite text editor and Ubuntu is my favourite Linux so I thought I would start here.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
Release: 16.04

$ apt-cache policy gedit
gedit:
  Installed: 3.18.3-0ubuntu4
  Candidate: 3.18.3-0ubuntu4
  Version table:
 *** 3.18.3-0ubuntu4 500
        500 http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ apt-cache policy medit
medit:
  Installed: 1.2.0-2
  Candidate: 1.2.0-2
  Version table:
 *** 1.2.0-2 500
        500 http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Tao Rich (tao-rich)]

I filed a bug report with GNOME:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792832

I added the link to:

Also affects project.