Japanese / CJK font settings for proper horizontal alignment

Question

I've had this right at one point in the past on one machine with a certain font type at a particular font size, but I can't seem to get it right again.

Look e.g. at how my org mode tables look once I add Japanese characters. Here are two examples using fonts that were supposed to align properly (I read somewhere).

Help!

This is version

GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.5) of 2014-12-10 on gaia, modified by Debian

Edit A copy-and-pasteable version of a bunch of alignment problems for anyone who wants to try themselves:

| a 漢字       |   |
| b はどう     |   |
| f デショウ a |   |
| ﾊｰﾌ          |   |
| ｗｈｏｌｅ   |   |
| half         |   |
| ○            |   |

Answer 1

There's a solution that may be the best one currently (I use this solution):

http://coldnew.github.io/blog/2013/11/16_d2f3a.html

Though the article is in Chinese, but you still can read the Emacs Lisp code easily to understand what mechanism it has done.

My configuration example may be helpful.

Answer 2

The solution turned out to be surprisingly easy. After adding

(set-default-font "Inconsolata-12")

to the end of my ~/.emacs, it kind of (see below for details) worked.

---

The Full story:

After copy-and-pasting the table into LibreOffice I noticed that Inconsolata worked, whereas DejaVu Sans Mono does not - which depends, I suppose, on my xorg font substitution settings. (My LibreOffice font substitution settings are empty.) To wit:

That lead me to just play around with Inconsolata in emacs a little more, and to the set-default-font solution mentioned above.

Not all font sizes work however, and if I increase/decrease the font size, the alignment gets messed up again. Here are the results for the sizes I tried:

━━━━━━━━━━━
 size  ok? 
───────────
    6  ok  
    8      
   10      
   12  ok  
   14      
   16      
   18  ok  
   20      
   22  ok  
   24      
   26      
━━━━━━━━━━━

There is also one minor issue which I guess must be blamed on org-table, that is when I use the TAB key to navigate through cells, the formatting sometimes changes for the worse. The following is the result of pressing TAB in the leftmost cell:

Luckily though, a quick C-c C-c will repair the whole table again.

Edit Turns out there are still some characters that do not align properly. Neither in LibreOffice, nor in emacs. Example:

character: ○ (displayed as ○) (codepoint 9675, #o22713, #x25cb)

Corresponding screenshot: