Idea: fix React Native text clipped on Android 15 (useBoundsForWidth)

[AmineYagoub]

The problem. On Android 15 and later, for apps that target SDK 35 or later, TextView breaks lines by the glyphs' ink bounds (useBoundsForWidth, on by default). React Native measures text by advances, in TextLayoutManager with StaticLayout and Layout.getDesiredWidth. When a word's ink runs past its last advance, the box React Native sized for one line is too narrow, so Android wraps the line and the second line is clipped out of sight.

What it cost us. In Minhajna (djazairdev/minhajna#185, fixed in djazairdev/minhajna#195), the chip label «تاريخ آخر» showed only «تاريخ». The label «سبب آخر», the same length, was fine.

In a probe on the Android 15 emulator, with Noto Naskh Arabic Medium at 28 px, «تاريخ آخر» measured 99 px of advances, but its ink ran from −1 to 99 px. textBreakStrategy doesn't help. React Native 0.87.1 declares a setUseBoundsForWidth lookup in TextLayoutManager.kt but never calls it.

Our workaround is <item name="android:useBoundsForWidth">false</item> in the app theme, kept in place by a test. The full analysis, and a report ready for React Native's tracker, are in docs/checks/text-bounds.md.

Who else it hits. Arabic, Persian and Urdu apps first, since Naskh fonts overhang a lot. Also any font with overhanging glyphs, such as italics and some display fonts. It's easy to miss: only some words wrap, and only on Android 15 and later.

What to build

• The upstream fix: a React Native pull request that measures with setUseBoundsForWidth matching the TextView's setting, or that turns it off on ReactTextView.
• Until that lands: a tiny Expo config plugin and React Native CLI snippet that applies the theme workaround, plus a dev-mode check. The check would measure each <Text> both ways and warn when they disagree.
• A test page: labels in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and italic Latin, for anyone to reproduce it.

Size: the config plugin is small, and the upstream pull request is a few lines plus tests. MIT, to match React Native.

From Minhajna's work; drafted with Claude Code.