String formatting for complex writing systems

[Andy]

Hi guys,

I'm writing a piece of software for some Thai friend.  At the end it
is supposed to print on paper some report with tables of text and
numbers.  When I test it in English, the columns are aligned nicely,
but when he tests it with Thai data, the columns are all crooked.

The problem here is that in the Thai writing system some times two or
more characters together might take one single space, for example งิ
(u"\u0E07\u0E34").  This is why when I use something like u"%10s"
% ..., it just doesn't work as expected.

Is anybody aware of an alternative string format function that can
deal with this kind of writing properly?

Any suggestion is highly appreciated.  Thanks!
Andy