I was getting tired of having to cut and paste from the Character Map to do my German homework in OpenOffice.org, so I used kxkb to add a German keyboard layout, something I had done long ago when I was a Windows user, and had just learned how in Linux. It seemed to be working fine, but then when I tried to use OpenOffice.org, any non-English characters wouldn't display correctly.
Here's how they would show up, with correct characters on the left, and how they would show up on the rigt.

ü      Ã¼
ö      Ã¶
ä      Ã¤
ß      ÃŸ.
Ü      Ãœ
Ö      Ã–
Ä      Ã„

I haven't noticed this problem in any other programs, however. Anybody know what this could possibly be?

afaik there a kind of localized add-on packages for oo.org (at least in debian there are).

sl mritch.

I'm pretty sure I already have the appropriate add-on, since I do have German spell-checking working fine. Also, it's not like these characters won't display at all. They just won't display if I use the German keyboard layout. If I use the International keyboard layout, they come out fine, but I don't like the international keyboard layout, especially since it doesn't have the ß.

i see. you get the right letters when typing into an xterm when switched to de layout / only oo?
if trouble's in oo only there may be some switches in the configfile. btw. does it also happen when you start oo with the german layout already set?
could have somthing to do with the meta setting, but i only came across problems with the german umlaute in general (ie. terminal too).
so you might try to set the environment variable MM_CHARSET (maybe MM_CHARSET=UTF-8).

sl mritch.

Exactly. Every other program I've tried to type using the German layout it works fine. OO.o is the only program that can't get it right. I thought for a while that maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm using Windows fonts (for some reason, the fonts that came with the distro don't show up on OO.o, although I don't mind that at all), but I tried using those fonts in other programs, with no problems.
Yes, even if I start oo with the German layout set, it still gives me the wrong characters. How would I check the configfile to see if the problem's there? Where would I find it, and what would I look for?
I tried "export MM_CHARSET=UTF-8" and then started oo with the German keyboard already set. Same problem.

i assume you have both keyboard layouts in the xserver configfile XF86Config.

afaik the user interface's language is depending from your LANG or LANGUAGE environment setting. so you may try to set this to "de_DE" and start oo. you will get german menues and all, but i think it's worth a try. i'm just interrested if oo displays umlauts in menues right then.
as umlauts are working on the console i think your system generated locales include de_DE@euro (i think it's iso8895-15) or something similar, but maybe oo tries to use some other which are not ready on your system. on debian you can choose from a list of locales to be generated when installing a package called "locales" (config is in /etc/locales) is there something similar in fc2?
so maybe oo needs a specific on the system.
anyway... i don't really know what's wrong here. i have de_AT (iso8859-1), de_AT.utf-8@euro (utf-8), de_AT.utf-8 (utf-8) and the same for en_US on my system and don't have this prob (i can use oo in en or de and it gives me the right layout).

if it's a font problem, the font replacement (oo -tools - options -somewhere) might help. but i don't think so. i rather guess it's about these utf-8 / iso8859-xx settings which i don't grok myself :-(

sl mritch.

update:

this might be a utf-8 / iso8859 mismatch. i knew i had this problem somewhere before.. it was with apache displaying umlauts exact that way wrong you posted above. the error was a default charset setting of iso8859-1. by setting it to utf-8 (which iirc is a more recent charset standard like iso8859-15, but even more globaly) the problem disappeared.
anyway, i'm clueless where to set it for your environment. i just can advise to set your LANG and similar to "UTF-8". hope that works..

My default sys language is German. I installed it along with several other languages when I installed FC2. Specifically, $LANG is set to de_DE.UTF-8. All the menus look fine in OO, with umlauts, and essets, and everything printing correctly. I tried changing the language to de_DE, and restart OO. The menus stayed the same, and the characters printed the same messed up way. I even tried setting LANG as de_DE.iso8859, with the same results.
MM_CHARSET is set to UTF-8, also. I may just have to use the International Keyboard layout, and keep ß in the clipboard, and just copy and paste that.

what's happening if you set LANG to "UTF-8" only? (but i'm not sure if this is valid at all...)

When I set LANG to UTF-8, I got the same results. Even the menus remained in German.