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This bug was filed before the changes to Bugzilla on 2011-10-16. Thus it
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Re-tested in bets 3.5x per email request.   Bug remains:  if I select "insert special character," and select Symbol font, a Greek (symbol) character is inserted.  However,  if I set the font to Symbol,  I get some large-caps font.  If I select Format Character, and select Symbol,  I get the notice that "This font style will be simulated or the closest matching font will be used."

So it looks like the font-setting dialogs don't properly retrieve the Symbol fontset.

It is possible that this bug is related to bug 39670 - "FILEOPEN Writer mis-displays greek letters in symbol font importing docx". This bug is marked as fixed but I suspect that it is not yet fixed for MacOS X. I will test both bugs again if/when I find some time ...

Thank you for your report! But I'm sorry to say that this is not a bug, it is just a misunderstanding about how fonts, letters and encodings interact in the age of Unicode. The behaviour you describe is irritating, I understand, but it is absolutely correct. If you try the same task e.g. in Apple's TextEdit application, you will get the same result (at least I get it; I am using LibreOffice 3.5.3.2 on MacOS X 10.6.8 with German UI, BTW).

To explain why, I have to go far back. In the good (or bad) old days of pre-Unicode computer-aided word processing and typesetting, i.e. in the 1980s and 1990s, each letter of a text was represented by one byte in memory, and each font cointanded only up to 2^8 = 256 glyphs (actually even less glyphs, because many of these 256 slots were used for control characters etc.). Therefore all symbol fonts used a simple trick: they did contain other glyphs at the place of the normal glyphs. So the classic 'Symbol' font contained a lowercase Greek alpha in the slot normally used for the Latin lowercase 'a', beta in the slot for 'b', etc. If you selected the 'Symbol' font and typed 'a', the Computer thought you wanted an 'a', which is in slog $61, and displayed this letter -- you would see a lowercase Greek alpha, but the computer thought (if anything) that this was just an 'a' taken. (To be honest, the sitation was much more complicated, because different encoding tables were used on different operating systems and depending on the main language, and Computers did not think at all, of course, they just 'calculated' something ;-)

But this was a bad trick. Why? If you used the 'Symbol' font to type a Greek letter, e.g. alpha, and then changed the font of this letter, you would see again a Latin 'a' -- or maybe something entirely different, e.g. some ornament, if you selected an ornaments font, or a Cyrillic letter, if you selected a Cyrillic font, etc. The computer just did not know that you wanted a Greek alpha, it only knew that you wanted slot $61, and what this slot contained depended completely from the font you used.

This is the old trick you are used to, and the behaviour you expect from LibreOffice: you type 'p f jkl; poiuzxcv' (quoting your attachment!), select the 'Symbol' font, and Greek letters will appear, is just this old trick.

But this trick does not work anymore in modern Unicode-enabled applications (it may still work in MS Word, as you report, but this just means that MS Word is a bit outdated).

Thanks to the new version of the 'Symbol' font Apple supplies with MacOS X, and thanks to LibreOffice, MacOS and LibreOffice now 'know' that the slot $61 of the 'Symbol' font does NOT contain a Latin 'a', but a small Greek alpha. Therefore, if you type 'a' and select the 'Symbol' font, the computer searches all 'Symbol' font slots for a Latin 'a'. But there is no small Latin 'a' in the 'Symbol' font. Therefore, to display the Latin 'a' you typed and requested, LbreOffice MUST use another font to display the 'a' at all; and this other font, just the first font LibreOffice finds containing a Latin 'a', is the "sans-serif font I don't recognize" (quoting your description).

That the 'Symbol' font is indeed "correctly accessed" by LibreOffice can be proved in different ways.

1) Just try some letters the 'Symbol' font shares with normal fonts -- e.g. the numbers. Type a line of text, assign to it some font looking entirely different from the 'Symbol' font (e.g. a bold sans-serif font), then type some numbers, e.g. '4592' in the mid of this line, select these numbers and select the 'Symbol' font -- you will recognize that really the figures from the 'Symbol' font are used (they look like figures from Times [New Roman], but this is no surprise, because 'Symbol' was designed to match the look of Times).

2) Enter the Greek lowercase letters using a Greek keyboard layout. To make this possible, go to the MacOS System preferences, select the section 'Language and Text', switch to the tab panel 'Input sources' [or however this may be called in English; in German, it is 'Eingabequellen'], search for the Greek keyboard in the long list at the left, check the checkbox near to it, then check the general check box 'Show input sources in menu bar' at the bottom of the window. Now a new menu showing small flags will appear in the right section of the MacOS menu bar. Switch to LibreOffice, open a Writer document, type some normal text, and then select the Greek flag from the new menu. If you now continue to type 'abc', small Greek letter will appear instead of Latin ones. If you select these Greek letters and assign the 'Symbol' font to them, they will look like the you expected: the good old alpha etc. from the Symbol font is used again. (Be sure to reset your keyboard to your normal one again after this test, because if you don't you will just continue to type Greek ... ;-)

Both tests work perfectly fine for me.

So, in a Nutshell: This is not a bug, it is just normal in the world of Unicode. It is confusing at the beginning, and my explanation may have been confusing, too. But if you get used to the new Unicode world, it will become familiar and you will (like me) be happy about it and remember the old pre-Unicode way of typing symbols etc. only with shuddering.

If you want to input any symbols from the Symbol font, you have at least three possibilites:

i) In LibreOffice, select 'Insert > Special characters' from the menu; in the dialog window, select 'Symbol' from the font menu; and then click any symbol you want to input. But you already know this.

ii) Select the 'Symbol' font as text font, select a Greek keyboard layout from the new flags menu (see (2) above) and just type. You have to figure out which key from your keyboard gives which Greek letter, of course; this varies depending on your (physical) keyboard. 'a' will give alpha, 'b' beta, but some other keys are more difficult. In the flags menu, you may find an item called 'Keyboard overview' or similar; if you select it, a small window appears which shows the current keyboard layout, i.e. which symbols are inserted when you press a key.

iii) In the flags menu, you may also find an item called 'Glpyh overview' or 'Letter overview' or similar. If you select it, a small window with an overview of all available Unicode symbols will appear. You see the complete wonderfull world of Unicode. If you select the section 'Greek and coptic letters', you will see the Greek letters again. Just double-click a letter and it will be inserted in the text you are currently editing.

Hope it helps. If my explanation is not easy to understand I'm sorry but I did the best what I can do here. (I may have even done more than what is appropriate in an answer to a bug report, of course ;-) There are many books, online refrences, etc. about Unicode and how to enter it, and many people that can help you. About the flags menu and selecting different keyboard layouts, Apple's online help should be helpful.

Closing this bug as RESOLVED/NOTABUG.

A supplement:

If you use the LibreOffice 'Insert > Special characters' feature, you do not even need to select 'Symbol' as font anymore; 'Times', 'Times New Roman' and many other fonts also contain the Greek letters you want. Just select the area/section 'Base Greek' (or similar) from the popup menu top right in the dialog window, and LibreOffice will show you the Greek letters.

To insert Greek letters from the current (main text) font instead of switching to 'Symbol' has the big advantage that the Greek letters should match the Latin ones closely in their design, and if you change the main text font, the design of the Greek letters will change, too -- always given the fact that the font you are using really contains the Greek letters.