Text wrapping in the wp8 app bar

Question

In my Windows Phone 8 app the app bar usually looks like this:

But for some reason on one of my users with a 1020 it looks like this: (it's a NOKIA RM-877_nam_att_205 3.3.0.2 3051.40000.1346.0001 with OS version 8.0.10517.0)

(the WP8 emulator also looks like the second one)

Anyone knows why this happens, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

The default behaviour of English text accompanying an ApplicationBarIconButton is for it to be on a single line.

Multi-line support was added for some languages where word length is typically longer than in English. The wrapping was therefore needed for text to not be clipped.

The enabling of multi-line support is dependent upon a combination of device, OEM and regional settings. Developers/apps cannot influence this behaviour.

The expectation of all English text accompanying an icon button is that it should be on a single line. If it ran across multiple lines and then was translated to a language which used longer words for the translation then the translated text would not fit in the available space.

You should only use text that can fit on a single line.
For your examples above, I'd recommend "catalog" and "downloads" as labels for the two buttons on the right.

Answer 2

It looks like there some regional dependency and there is no fix yet, since it not accessible from the application. Same problem at the msdn.

Users reported: English-UK, French, German or Dutch - wrap. English-US - truncate.