Font preview in dropdown?

There is no preview in the dropdown.
In order to have a preview in the dropdown, one of 2 things would have to happen:
Solution 1: Download ALL fonts from the google API and style the dropdown
Solution 2: Use images instead of text in the dropdown

Solution 1 is unacceptable because in order to do that users would have to download a few gigabytes of fonts on their local machine in order to view the fonts
Solution 2 is unacceptable because we show all fonts, and they get updated from the google-fonts API regularly. Having images would be too hard to maintain and is only a viable solution with a small subset of fonts and not all of them.
There are a couple of font-selectors out there that use this approach, but they either show select font-families, OR they don’t get regularly updated.

Thanks Ari.

Would it be possible to lazy load fonts as the user scrolls through the select options? I think that’s the way a few themes do it- the font names momentarily appear in plain text and are quickly replaced by the font face when the come into the viewport.

Possible? Yes. Wise? Not so much. You’d still have to download a few gigabytes of fonts. The fact that you download them in batches instead of all at once makes no difference… Not everyone enjoys a fast internet connection and forcing users to download all these things is environmentally irresponsible.
Is a fancier dropdown really worth downloading all that data every time you want to make an adjustment to the font-family? To some, the answer is definitely yes, but it’s an unsustainable practice that makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes the client has a fast connection, does not have data-metering, and doesn’t know what they want so they have to preview the fonts.
I live in an area with poor internet speeds and my data plan limits me to 70GB/month. Having a dropdown like that would mean that if I start scrolling the font-family selector I won’t be able to do my job that day because of the wasted data…