4 ways canvas text rendering breaks in multilingual apps (that en/ja testing will never catch)

I run a large fleet of "preview it, then download it as PNG" web tools — name tags, certificate generators, price cards, badges — in five languages: Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese. Canvas 2D text rendering looks correct as long as you only test Japanese and English. It breaks when you run es/fr/pt through it. After stepping on these repeatedly, the failures collapse into four patterns. The premise: Latin languages run 1.4–2× longer than Japanese Design data first. The same label, measured across five locales: Example ja en es fr pt Tool name 22 chars 35 62 48 50 "Standard" button 4 8 10 20 12 Rule of thumb: fr/pt come out 1.4–1.7× longer than ja; es can balloon to nearly 3×. A font size and maxWidth tuned to fit Japanese will not fit the Latin locales. All four failure patterns grow from this. Pattern 1: hand-rolled wrapping via text.split(/\s+/) collapses on CJK The classic snippet — split on spaces, wrap word by word — does nothing for Japanese or Chinese, where words aren't space-delimited. An entire sentence becomes one unbreakable token and clips at the canvas edge. Test with real Japanese input and check that the final line renders to its last character. "Most of it showed up" is not a pass. Pattern 2: an ASCII-only tokenizer splits words at accented characters Fix pattern 1 with a character-class tokenizer like [A-Za-z0-9'\-_] and you've traded one regression for another: ç é ã ó ñ aren't in that class, so produção fragments into produ / ç / ão mid-word. An English test will never catch this. Generate actual PNGs with fr/es/pt samples and eyeball the area around accented characters. I never found another detection method — string-comparison tests can't see a rendering-level split. Pattern 3: the important word at the end vanishes into "…" Since fr/pt run 1.4–1.7× longer than the ja the layout was tuned for, text overflows its two lines and gets ellipsized. The cruel part: what disappears is the tail of the phrase — often the semantically criti