special characters in open office

[aerospace1028 at hotmail.com]

Greetings all,I have a question about accessing the special characters dialog in open office document writer.
I have been playing around with an Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon live CD for the past few days.  I am having trouble in the special characters dialog found in the insert menu.  From what I gather, there are two combo boxes; one for selecting font style and another for the character subset (latin extended, greek, etc).  I can work with both of these fine.  The problem is with the character field where I'm supposed to arrow around and pick the character I want.  Orca doesn't seem to tell me what character I am on.
Is there a trick to this dialog that I don't know?  or is there an alternate manner of entering special characters?  The windows equivalent allows the user to enter the unicode value for the character but I don't see anything like that here.
 
ps
I know this is more of an orca-list at gnome.org thing, but I've tried three times in the past four days to send this message, but it doesn't seem to get through.  I'm not sure what the problem is.
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