It seems that the 2 main criticism against the way Word handles font
preview are:

1) Usability. As Karl said "The font size is much
   to small to get a useful impression of the font (and often make it
   very difficult to read the actual font name)"

2) Resources. It takes too much to preview all the fonts.

For the usability point, Word has a very clear advantage, you can see a
font preview of *every* font at the same time, while with Mark feature
you can only see the current selected font.

And if the font preview is unreadable then it will be unreadable and
unusable for all the document. We can still render the font preview at
14pt.

For the resources point, it has to be measured.  Period.  Show me
figures.  More than 200ms will be slow to me, everything faster is ok. 
The Xft build is pretty slow rendering the preview, I will take a look
at the reason, but I think that it can be pretty fast.

I don't say that the Word way is the best we can do, but the advantage
of seeing all the fonts at the same time (when you're looking for a
font, that's what matters!) looks important to me.

Cheers,

-- 
Joaqu�n Cuenca Abela
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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