The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
display all the characters Emacs supports.
+Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
+missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
+character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
+but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
+of this character to display a space.
+
* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.