As Lior Kaplan demonstrated at LibreOffice 2011 Paris, our format character preview really sucks for CTL and CJK users. If no CTL/CJK text is selected then no CTL sample text is shown, and the CJK sample text is from the fontname itself. Many font names are just Latin text, so give no indication what they look like in the actual script/language that is being written in.
e.g. Old dialog for CTL, will only preview some Western text if no text is selected, no attempt to show any sample CTL text, or even the CTL fontname. For CJK it will additional show the fontname of the CJK font in the preview, which isn’t helpful if the CJK fontname contains no CJK glyphs.
Simply adding the CTL fontname wouldn’t help much, seeing as the fontname is David CLM. So, currently reusing the preview text used in the font-dropdown first stab at “doing the right thing” gives me…
Code for all this is mostly in svtools/source/misc/sampletext.cxx where there is now some hugely over-engineered set of heuristics to guess the best script a font is tuned for and various functions to generate suitable text when all we have is the font, versus the font+language vs just the language and if we want a short identifier to classify what script a font might be good to render vs a longer sequence of sample text for a font preview.
Probably best to drop rendering the fontname in the Western case for the text preview and use some sample text there too, at least for the mixed Western+CTL+CJK case as its confusing to have a font name rendered and some sample text in another font.
—
After initial posting, there was some comments about the hideous rendering of the Hebrew text, which appears to be an artefact or using David CLM. Here’s what it looks like with David, i.e. its the rendering using that font that misplaces the Nikud, not me. Whether this is an interesting bug in our renderer, or maybe glyph fallback, or the font itself it probably worth of investigation.
