Hi everyone,

for our graduation my class is writing a newpaper. Everyone is writing something and handing it over to me - them, using XP, me using a refurbished Fedora Core 3 (2.6.15 kernel, kde 3.5.2, gcc 4.0.0, etc.).

Since our school is in greece and many of fellow students are quite confortable using the greek language many hand me articles written (some only partially) in greek. Some of the articles include special characters (hearts, smyllies a.o.)

My system in general is able of handling greek fonts. Consoles, X and even KDE don't give me any trouble. But OpenOffice (version 1.9.104, splash says 2.0.0 Beta) is terribly stuborn.

The problems are the following:
1) Most of the special characters are converted to something like &#133.
2) Greek characters do not appear at all. Depending on the selected font one can see garbled cyphers. Alone Courier is able to read some characters like alpha or sigma. The weird thing is that the very same fonts work just perfectly outside OpenOffice (for example in gimp or gedit).

Could someone perhaps help me with this problem? I suppose that UTF-8 is used, but I do not know how to verify it. I checked the OpenOffice documentation and browsed all of the settings, but I didn't find anything of particular help. The net generally appears to say "install truefont in $HOME/.openoffice/something", but dont my fonts already support greek if I can use them with other programs?

Thanks in advance...

have you tried looking into scim. It allows you to type in a lot of languages, it might have some font libraries or something attached to it that it might work. I know it works great for japanese. Good luck.