This has been on many people virtual todo list for a long time... But it seems that nobody decided to actually do it :)
Note that it is difficult to make this work correctly (for example, it is difficult to know which are the fonts that you
actually have and that TeX can use). Having a font usable on
display and having a font usable by TeX are two very
different things.
Related to this (although, slightly indirectly) is this announcement (for a while still non-official, so you have never read this mail :-)
There is a new macro OFS available on
ftp://math.feld.cvut.cz/pub/olsak/ofs/ (BTW, I am not the author,
I have just helped with the translation of manual to English; the author is Mr. Petr Olsak http://math.feld.cvut.cz/olsak).
Let me cite from the part of the manual for its description:
The OFS is a \TeX{} macro for managing large sets of fonts.
You can select the appropriate fonts comfortably by the names
from font catalog used by a font foundry. It means you don't
have to remember short names of tfm files and/or short names
of NFSS font families. The user interface of this macro is the
same in \LaTeX{} and in plain but there are two independent implementations of this macro: first and more elaborate: based
only on plain macros; second: based on NFSS macros for
\LaTeX{} users.
Do you think that this thing may help in creating more human-friendly system for LyX managing fonts (so that for example I would have three fields in Layout/Document setting \rmdefault, \sfdefault, and \ttdefault with selection from full name fonts (i.e., "Helvetica" instead of phv)?
What do you think about this?
Matej
-- Matej Cepl, Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC 138 Highland Ave. #10, Somerville, Ma 02143, (617) 623-1488
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review
of Pennsylvania, 1759.