[Scribus] problem with Nimbus Mono font

[David Goodenough]

I have been using Scribus for a while now to produce the reference sheet 
for our Village News.  This contains diary entries, useful phone numbers
and train and bus timetables.

For the timetables I had settled on using Nimbus Mono.  They are laid out
in vertical columns with a single space between the columns.  Until my 
last upgrade (I am now using 1.3.3.6 on Debian unstable) this worked well
and all the numbers and the spaces were the same width.  Now in spite of
being a Mono font, the numbers are varying in width.

The font is set through a style which is set on each line in the story
editor.

If I go into the Font Preview, the font is shown as a properly fixed pitch
font.

Is there any way to force this back to being fixed pitch (I have a deadline
to meet and reworking it will have to be for the next edition).

I realise that using fixed pitch fonts like this is not the right approach
but I had not wanted to put in loads of tabs (it makes using the story editor
very difficult as it uses 8 characters per tab, and there are so many columns
that it would overflow even a full width window).  The alternative would be
to make each column (each train/bus journey) a frame on its own, which would
also make it easier to add new journeys and as there are too many journeys
per day for them all to fit on a line, move them from one line to another. 
But it would making minor changes more difficult as rather than opening up 
the whole timetable in one I would have to open each journey to edit it.

Does anyone have any good models as to how to deal with kind of problem.

David