The current font drop down had a few small annoyances in it, it previews the font by rendering the font’s name in that font itself, but assumes that the same point size in any given font will have the same baseline and height as the default UI font, which leads to misplaced entries and cut-off text, e.g. 
The other gripe is the positioning of the extra preview text used if the font is a symbol font or cannot render its own name, e.g.
the positioning of the symbols of OpenSymbol, 
So, now (checked into 3.4) the preview is more carefully vertically centred and scaled to fit if necessary. e.g. 
Additionally the extra preview text is right aligned (also checked in for 3.4). For extra cunning (to be checked in today) when the font is tuned for rendering a specific script e.g. Arabic or Telugu, then some sample glyphs from that script are shown as extra preview text, seeing as its not massively useful to get an Latin script preview of the fontname which the massive likelihood is that its not really intended for use for that script, effectively guaranteed in the case that it doesn’t even have sufficient glyphs in it to render its own name. In most cases the string for each script is hopefully that scripts major language’s translation/equivalent to “Alphabet” or some such. 
And under windows a sample preview a sample pair of Windows simplified and traditional Chinese fonts 
Great UX improvement. Any chance of getting the styles and formatting to display in the font and style itself?
Well, it would be far better if you work on a “live preview” feature your main enemy Microsoft already has. If I mouse over a font/color/table/etc. it should be temporarily used so that I can instantly see how it looks like until I select it to use it. I hope that LO also gets this great feature!!
Awesome
Wow, that looks great – thanks! Small improvements, but so incredibly helpful.
Thank you very much for the awesome feature. I was waiting this fix since 2005.
This is very nice.
May I also respectfully point to my proposal here http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116857
It was closed as a duplicate of Issue 15421 http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=15421 but that Issue has been open since 2003 — and no target date for a fix yet.
Perhaps LibreOffice will take this on?
Are you aware of this great font widget design proposal? http://unifont.org/fontdialog/
Yes, the major difference I guess is the lack of classification in the current one. Currently I’ve taken a fontconfig sort of approach and decided that e.g. a font with a GSUB/GPOS table for “arab” and nothing else (outside of latn) is an “font tuned for Arabic” and show some Arabic script preview, and so on for other fonts. That’s the sort of “messy” bit which makes the classification thing potentially problematic.
I really love the floating preview bit of the proposal. Collecting pangrams/representative sentences for various languages/scripts would be kind of fun there.
Please please please implement the widget proposed-linked by Olivier up there.
You can find the code in svtools/source/control/ctrlbox.cxx
Having sample glyphs is super useful. Thank you so much!
Two suggestions:
1. It would be even more useful if there were a way for the individual user to customise their sample glyphs to be displayed. For example, instead of a word meaning “alphabet”, a user might want to choose something that shows how well this particular font handles common legibility issues such as “0” vs. “O” or “1” vs. “l” vs “I”, to give an example from Latin. I’m sure there are similar issues in most scripts of the world. I would use this for CJK.
2. The “1·l·I” example shows that this new feature, coupled with the customizability of sample glyphs, can also be useful for Western fonts. I’m not saying it should be the default but it would be nice to have it. As another example, a user might be looking for fonts that support lowercase numerals.
There is an issue of availability of space of course, Clearly its not possible to ram everything in the small bit of space currently available. But it’s plausible to e.g. have an extended preview tooltip or expanded submenu with some script specific samples in it to preview the various gotchas like you describe. I’m prefer not have have customized ones, well at least not customize-able through menus anyway, but rather good pre-canned per-script ones. So seeing as you suggest you’d use it for CJK, how about drawing us a picture of something that would be useful for you and stick it up somewhere as your dream font-preview widget for consideration (and a utf-8 text of the chars used)
As it stands, I’m not entirely sure about the current small CJK previews we’re using to know if they’re helpful or not.
I am testing LibreOffice 3.4 beta 4 in Chinese (Traditional) Locale, the font dropdown list only supports “Simplified Chinese font” showing “?” on the right side, but not supports “Traditional Chinese font”.
Furthermore, LibreOffice now even choose “Microsoft YaHei ?” for Traditional Chinese locale in Windows (not sure for Linux). This is not a good thing for we Traditional Chinese users. We are forced to use “Simplified Chinese font” by default.
If there are something we, Traditional Chinese users, can help with this process, please contact me directly.
Sounds like the kind of thing you should write a bug report about with all the detail needed to reproduce it. For the first point the code is in svtools/source/control/ctrlbox.cxx. We search for 0x7E41 as a prerequisite for supporting traditional chinese. So ideally a concrete example of a font which is misbehaving in the preview would be a good idea
most recently used fonts are saved and stored on exit and restart now as well