(has been great to watch the selection of special characters grow over the years, but now there are so many that it gets hard to navigate easily.) 1. Insert - Special Character - Subset: 2. Click on dropdown box. Actual result: Subset names are shown (in no apparent order). Proposed result: More sensible ordering (even alphabetic would be better).
Not clear this is of any use. The listbox is populated per font by the Unicode blocks the font provides coverage of. The order is by Unicode block sequence which is also the order in which the character chart is constructed. There is "localization" of the categories, nor translation of the codepoint Names, so attempts to alphabetize the list block would be more of a detractor than a help. IMHO => WF
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1) > There is "localization" of the categories Sorry, make that 'There is no "localization" of the categories'
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1) > The listbox is populated per font by the Unicode blocks the font provides > coverage of. How does the "Search" function work? (with "Liberation Serif", writing "Greek" or "Hebrew" into the field, give sensible results. "Arro" is good for "Arrows" and "su" for super- and subscripts, but Phonetic (which is also a subset) gives nothing, and could not figure out Punctuation and mathematical operators). Also noticed that using "Search" greys out the "Subsets" listbox. (Just looking for an easier way to use the "growing" character sets -- does not necessarily have to be alphabetizing).
We blogged about the reasoning behind the current implementation in https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/03/26/libreoffice-design-session-special-character/ and more recently in https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2018/12/14/special-characters-the-final-touch/. Search applies to the symbol name and filters out all "Arrow", for example, independently from the subset. Wouldn't mess with the predefined sorting like Stuart. So let's resolve as WF.