'Symbol' font in OpenOffice.org does not work

[Mikko Huhtala]

The 'Symbol' font is invisible in the font menu of OpenOffice 1.1
Writer. The characters themselves in text are either not rendered at
all or are rendered wrong. Reading in existing documents with
e.g. Greek letters does show the glyphs, but they are rendered on top
of adjacent characters that are in other fonts.

The problem occurs with both the RPM-packaged OOo 1.1 that comes with
Fedora Core 1 and OOo 1.1 installed using the installer package from
the OOo web site. The Symbol font *does* work using the exactly same
version, installation and config files of OOo on Red Hat 9, which
makes me think that the new fontconfig or something in Fedora breaks
OOo.

Can someone verify this? Is this a known problem? I submitted a bug in
the RH bugzilla, but there have been no responses.

I'm looking to update a dozen or so desktops in a scientific lab. The
font problem may seem like a small thing, but it is actually a
showstopper bug for us, since almost everyone's documents have a few
alphas, betas, gammas etc. per sentence.

Mikko