Bullet points not appearing correctly in OpenOffice.org on the Mac

I've been using OpenOffice.org in it's various Mac versions for some time now and am currently using a version of 2.0.2 under X11. It has proven to be very reliable, but today an outstanding issue with the display of bullet points came to a head for me and I decided to try and sort it out.

I trawled the usual places and got snippets of information but surprisingly little by way of a complete solution.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the consensus is that Microsoft Word stores bullet characters in a representation which does not convert easily to UTF-8 and relies on the presence of a suitably coded Symbol font that presents these characters correctly.

The standard Symbol font installed on a Mac does not have the correct encoding to display these symbols, but the URW (whatever that might stand for) version of the Symbol font which is distributed with TexMF and apparently with Ghostscript, is suitable.

I found that I had the font on my machine within my teTeX installed (installed with DarwinPorts). The font was in a file called "usyr.pfb".

I copied this file into the truetype fonts directory inside my OpenOffice.org installation inside the openoffice.org/share/fonts/truetype folder.

However, this isn't enough, because OpenOffice.org continues to use the other Symbol font installed in my case as a series of files prefixed with the name Symbol (surprise surprise!). So I removed those files.

Now I just restarted OpenOffice.org and opened a previously temperamental Word document to find that the bullet points had returned. Indeed, even the exported PDF files displayed correctly.