I would very much like a font preview in the preview pane but cannot find a plugin which does so. Even Quickview Plus does'nt preview fonts. The functionality is right inside DOpus because font thumbnails ARE created... but no extended preview in the pane.
If you're on Vista you'll get a font viewer in a few weeks once I finish making a plugin that uses Vista's Preview API. Writing a dedicated font viewer that doesn't need Vista is further down my list, though.
I use a freeware utility named FontList to view my fonts. The most recent version was not designed for Vista. It installs on Vista. But you will be prompted to allow it to run each time. It runs successfully, creating an HTML file displaying all of your installed fonts. However, it doesn't open the resulting HTML file automatically. I just create Desktop shortcut to it to get to it easily.
Yeah, I use a number of font utilities as well. The problem is they're all stand-alone. What would help me is a viewer within Directory Opus that shows fonts in the viewer pane as you move from file to file.
An XP font viewer might come at some point but not any time soon, unless someone else does it or I get bored of the other things that are higher up my list.