glutBitmapString misses blank spaces

Hi,
It seems that glutBitmapString misses blank spaces.
I am making an animation, at each time step, I use glutBitmapString to print out some information like this,

sprintf(message, “step=%-8d t=%-15g mass=”, step, t);
glutBitmapString(GLUT_BITMAP_HELVETICA_18, (unsigned char*) message);

however, as the variables step ,t, change at each time step, and the message is of different length which should not be ( If I use printf("%s
",message) to print the same message to screen, it is of exact length and mass aligns at the same column). I need “mass=” to apear at the exact location at each time step.

Anybody else has met the same problem? Any suggestion how to fix it?
Thanks.

work around the problem.
Break the print statement up into two or more parts and use gltranslatef to position the printing of the string.