There was some great work going on improving the font menu, with Ed Trager's great Font Selection Widget proposal. then with Alberto Ruiz's first mockup then followed by a second one.

What I'm hoping now is that there will be a rebirth of a smart font viewer bringing together features of James Henstridge's fontilus - for which the viewer itself and the thumbnailer have been kept in the current trunk - James Wouter Bolsterlee's gnome-specimen, mrbovinity's serif, Davyd Madeley's gucharmap implementing font tab, Dov Grobgeld's guci, Keith Packard's and Noah Levitt's gwaterfall, and Owen Taylor's hinting viewer.

Improved views at different sizes, hinting and weights, better searchability of glyphs with Unicode goodness, knowlege of which fonts are used, the possiblity to deactivate fallback, more useful font metadata exposed with clickable links...

I could well imagine gucharmap being extended into a Unicode quiz/flashcard language learning tool :-)

Any GTK/GNOME hackers out there want to take on the challenge?