OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, its commercial sister product (which is free for researchers), and NeoOffice, the current native OS X version, all come with an equation editor which uses a TeX-like syntax to create formulas. The editor is easy to use and can typeset most formulas (read the Formula command howto for advanced use). There are, however, some symbols that aren’t included in the default editor. In this tutorial, I show how to easily add these symbols, making the equation editor more robust.
Step 1. Get the fonts. MIT offers a freely available set of math fonts for Windows, Mac and Linux. Installation differs depending on your O, but there are instructions on the donwload page. For Windows, there is a simple two-click installer.
Step 2. Open the equation editor. The easiest way to do this is to open a Writer document and select Insert: Object: Formula.
Step 3. Open the symbol catalog. Just go to Tools: Catalog. The Catalog has a dropdown menu for the symbol set to which you want to add your symbol. Most of the Greek characters are already there, so you’ll probably want to select Special. Click edit to launch the edit symbols dialog.
Step 4. Add the symbol.
(a) In the “Edit symbols” dialog, delete the entry under “Old symbol”
(b) In the symbol field, type the command that you want to use to refer to the symbol. For example, say you want to use the binary order symbol 
(c) Select the font that you want to use under the font dropdown menu. The MIT math fonts are named Math1 through Math5. You will need to browse through the catalog to find your symbol.
(d) Select the symbol that you want to add and click add.
Note: If the modify button is not grayed out, you forgot to remove the old symbol. Clicking add will replace the currently selected old symbol with the new symbol, which might not be what you want.
Now you’re done. You can use the symbol in all of your documents. It may not show up correctly if you edit your document on another computer, though, so you may want to use PDF files to share your document with others.
The symbol editor dialog on Windows
