Text that does not fit — overflow:

The engine does not clip. Text wider than its box is drawn over whatever sits beside it; text taller than its box is drawn over the row below. Nothing is cut off, and nothing warns you.

That is fine most of the time — sizing to content gives a row or column the space its text needs. But sometimes there is no space to give: a name is user-entered, a description is longer than the panel, a label has to sit in a fixed strip. overflow: says what to do then.

gui_text("$text:`{ship_name}`;", "overflow: shrink;")

The four policies

policy	what it does
spill (default)	draw it anyway — today's behaviour, and the historical one
shrink	step the font down until it fits
ellipsis	truncate and append ...
hide	do not draw it at all

spill is the default so that no existing layout changes. You opt in per widget; there is no cascade.

Supported on every text-bearing widget: gui_text, gui_button, gui_checkbox, gui_input (typein) and radio buttons.

Choosing one

shrink keeps all the information and is usually right for a name or a value. It walks down the font ladder (gui-6 → … → smallest) and stops at the first size that fits, so a slightly-too-long string barely changes and a wildly too-long one becomes small but readable.

ellipsis is right when the start of the string identifies it and the tail is detail — a file path, a long mission title in a list. The reader can tell something was cut; with shrink they cannot.

hide is for decoration that is not worth overlapping other text. Use it sparingly: silently dropping content is rarely what a player wants.

Gotchas

It runs at present time, on the final rect. The policy cannot be applied until the layout is done, because until then the box is not known. That is also why it costs nothing when unused — a widget with no policy never measures.

A typein reacts as the player types. overflow: shrink on gui_input means the font steps down as the text grows past the box. That is correct, but it is a live effect none of the other widgets have, so look at it before shipping it. ellipsis on a field someone is still editing is almost never right.

It is a last resort, not a layout tool. If a row is systematically too small, size it properly — row-height: content, or a bigger area. Reach for overflow: when the content is genuinely unbounded and the space genuinely is not.

Interaction with content sizing. A column that is content-sized has already been given the width its text asked for, so a policy there only fires when the layout could not honour that request (an oversubscribed row). The two work together: size to content first, and let overflow: handle the leftovers.