How to Fix Broken Bullets in OpenOffice for Mac

This tends to happen when opening a .doc(x) file in Writer, or after saving it as a .doc(x) file from Writer then reopening the file. A temporary fix is to unbullet then rebullet the text, but upon saving and reopening, the broken bullets will return. For some, the character looks like a black clapperboard but for me (and in most other documented cases), the broken character looked like this:

Broken bullet character (size 197) retrieved with Unicode Hex Input keyboard (E000)

This has been filed as a bug since at least 2003, and the current bug thread, started in 2008, can be found here. It has something to do with a dependency on the Windows Symbol font, but I don't know why it hasn't yet been fixed.

I found a simple workaround in the openoffice.org forums here that worked for me. The post I used explained that one could copy the symbol.ttf font from Windows to do this, but the author also generated a version of the font to avoid licensing issues, which I've linked below. Here's how to fix it:

1. Download symbol.ttf.
2. Right-click on OpenOffice.org.app and choose "Show Package Contents".
3. In the new window that comes up, navigate to Contents/basis-link/share/fonts/truetype/ and copy symbol.ttf into this folder.
4. You should now see bullets correctly.