> I'm confused why SDL_TTF would go out of its way to avoid breaking there.
SDL_TTF doesn't break at all. If you have a long Chinese text which uses proper punctuation characters, it would never break, because it only breaks on ASCII whitespace.
I wanted to avoid breaking lines in the middle of a word, so I added extra "regular" space characters to force breaking the line.
You don't really need to only break on punctuation. There is no convention to do so and so long as you so not break any logograms in half, the resulting text reads perfectly fine. In fact, the convention is to have left and right justified text with equal numbers of monospaced logograms, including punctuation, on each line (on the equivalent for vertical text).
Classical Chinese before the 20 th century was seldom punctuated.
I know, I meant the actual ones you wrote above.
> I'm confused why SDL_TTF would go out of its way to avoid breaking there.
SDL_TTF doesn't break at all. If you have a long Chinese text which uses proper punctuation characters, it would never break, because it only breaks on ASCII whitespace.
I wanted to avoid breaking lines in the middle of a word, so I added extra "regular" space characters to force breaking the line.