Bug 98817

Copying what Microsoft does is just the Chinese way of innovation, but I think we can do better:
For the font selection dialog here is what I missed all the time (wasted lots of time scrolling a huge font list looking for some specific look):

1) When listing available fonts, the fonts already used in the document should be on the top of the list, because it's very likely they will be re-used, and it will avoid random errors by selecting a similar, but not the same font.

2) Fonts selected most recently should be on the top of the list (for the same reasons stated in 1)). Maybe 1) OR 2) is sufficient, but 1) neither includes 2), as 2) does not include 1).

3) There should be a way to sort fonts by similarity instead of names (that aren't really helpful to most users). If you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PANOSE.

4) Once the framework for 3) is set up, the user should be allowed to filter the list by attributes.

5) For systems where there exist "font aliases" (like "Sans" in Linux), the real name of each font should be displayed and alias names avoided (hidden). More frequently than not, those alias definitions change after operating system upgrades (talking Linux now), and what the user does not want is that a different font is used in the document. (I'm not 100% sure this happens in LibreOffice, but it happened in Inkscape).

6) I'm not sure about this one: If you have 3) implemented, the list of fonts could start with the font currently selected, the sort according to similarity with the font most different at the end of the list. Rationale: Sometimes the user want a similar font, while sometime he/she wants a completely different font.

7) Sorting by coding systems (Unicode blocks) may seem useful also: Europeans may typically use one coding system, people from Asia another, in between Greeks and Russians (apologies to all the others I missed).  Unless you write dictionaries or multi-language documents, you would hardly change the coding system. OK Symbol and ornament fonts play a special role here.