This has been bugging me for a bit:

text, inputtext and gridtext fields truncate strings at the introduction of <

After some investigation, I discovered the issue is a problem with the evaluation of the width. Here's a change I made to gridttext:

<inputtext visible="${!parent.editing}"
width="${parent.width}" y="$once{ parent.height /2 - this.height/2}"
fgcolor="${ parent.immediateparent.selected ?
                                    classroot._textselectedcolor:
                                    (parent.immediateparent.highlighted ?
                                                classroot._texthilitecolor:
                                                classroot._textcolor)}"
datapath="$once{parent.parent.rowdp}">
<method event="ontext">
this.setWidth(this.getTextWidth());
</method>
<method event="oninit">
this.setEnabled(false);
</method>
</inputtext>

'Less than' characters now work correctly. This doesn't seem to help the text component though.