We sometimes have to truncate text when there is not enough space to display it. In most of those cases the displayed text will then end in an ellipsis to indicate that the string has been clipped.

But our "ClipRight" code does not add an ellipsis if it results in the ellipsis takes up more than 20% of the resulting string. This causes confusion because text clipped without an ellipsis can just look misspelled, an example reported here: T80313

The reasoning behind the current behavior is the idea that, as the string gets really short, the last character shown is more important than the ellipsis. But I feel that is incorrect. It is quite important toknowwherewordsend. The ellipsis serves the purpose of indicating that "this word does not end here". Not only does that help to understand why you are looking at a partial word, but also serves as a signal to make that area wider.

The following illustrates the change in this patch. The left shows current behavior as a word gets shorter, the right shows how it behaves after this patch is applied.