It turns out that in GTK3, if you instantiate a GtkLabel and
immediately try to find out its preferred size, you get back zero for
both dimensions. Presumably none of that gets figured out properly
until the widget is displayed, or some such.
However, you can retrieve the PangoLayout from the label immediately
and ask Pango for the dimensions of that. That seems like a bit of a
bodge, but it works! The GTK3 unifont selector now comes out with all
the interface elements in sensible sizes - in particular, the preview
drawing area now has non-zero height.
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