I don't understand "about as well as it can be". It's either aligned, or it isn't. It's not:

[root@alpd054 root]# echo '      appl' | od -ctx1
0000000                           a   p   p   l  \n
        20 20 20 20 20 20 61 70 70 6c 0a

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 1:18 PM
To: VANDEMAN, MIKE
Cc: 14657@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#14657: od -cx

On 06/18/13 13:00, VANDEMAN, MIKE wrote:
> Why aren't the character- & hex translation lined up?:

It works for me.  When I run this shell script:

echo '      appl' | od -cx

the output is lined up, about as well as it can be:

0000000                           a   p   p   l  \n
           2020    2020    2020    7061    6c70    000a
0000013

If it's not working for you, please supply a test case
like the above.  We can't reproduce the bug simply by
looking at your output.