Dear All,

I use Fontlab to design fonts and have been using it for a number of years. There is something I have been wondering about for sometime—an explanation that I have not come across anywhere. This is how  to display sample characters in font dropdown box in Word. Some fonts such as some Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, etc. fonts display sample characters or glyphs. See the image for example.

Does anyone of you know where the characters are inserted in Fontlab font information box for this to happen? Thanking you in advance for anyone who may wish to reply.

I wouldn’t know that you can control those characters from within the font. That’s a feature of the app I suppose.

That specific font in the picture seems to have a wrong character set setting such as “Symbol”. In that case Word won’t print the name in those “symbols” (because that will usually be not legible), but rather show the name in a standard font in the font list. 

OpenType 'name' table have pre-defined Id=19 for sample text. Maybe You can try it. I don't know, how FontLab support OpenType names, in FontForge You can find it in Element - Font information - TTF data.

OpenType NAME spec