The Utter Mystery of the input box on Mac

[Michaelv]

As some may have observed, the input box labels (in front of input fields) on Macs were often truncated.
People writing plugins for PC with a nice input box, usually gave us half labels or similar symptoms.

While I never looked into it deeply, I always assumed that the length of the labels were kind of fixed to a certain number, and usually by creatively abbreviating the labels I managed to fit enough info into it that it worked. Not great but it worked.

Then this morning I realized that some plugins were able to challenge what I though was the hard limit (12 characters).

So I went on a fishing expedition to try to figure it out.

Let's say that so far the mystery deepens and the plot thickens.

I can fit 33 characters. Yet the label is still truncated.

So I tried different hypothesis (total number of characters for all labels, first field determines the possible width, spaces and other characters (:) play a role, numbers versus letters, size of selection plus size of label, uppercase versus lowercase) and I absolutely cannot make any logical sense of it.

Every time I think I have reached a limit, it's not a hard one, yet there is always one of which rule completely escape reasoning (at least mine, and so far)

So so far the best I can come up with is to write every label in the following manner:

"Label for the field of value to be chosen --"

You'll notice the block of two dashes at the end. The sole purpose of it is for it to be truncated on purpose, so that the rest of the text is accepted. That seems to be a key, to give something for the beast to feed upon.
It seems to work pretty good with a reasonable length (but now 33 instead of 12, not bad)
Sometimes it is truncated, sometimes not, sometimes it is truncated and leaving me with 33 characters, sometimes it is with less.
There just doesn't seem to be any logic to it, but so far it helps. More to investigate.

It's like someone that loved scrabble played a joke on us, and affected different weight to different letters and combination thereof, and that would be the limit, the total weight that we know nothing about. Maybe I should try all Q an Zs labels