Math/Phonological formulae

Y'all may recall that some time ago I asked about creating BIG parens,
square brackets, curly braces to enclose phonological feature matrices...
Thanks to a ref. on Prof. Yehuda Falk's homepage (recently cited
http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/ ), it turns out that Word Perfect (I have
WP8) has a way to do this and from experiments so far it seems relatively
idiot-proof :-)) HOWEVER, if one is writing the text in, say, Thryomanes,
the IPA and Special Characters used in text are apparently in some other,
pre-determined font, and look horrible.  Can anyone suggest a way around
this? (Open the font's char.map and select chars.?? I can't find
instructions on how to do that; I knew how a long time ago...)
The other disadvantage of using WP (my version at least) is that it's not
possible to convert the file to a PDF.

It also turns out that Open Office Writer has a similar deal; you get to it
by INSERT > Object > formula, which leads to OOo Math Help, where there are
instruction on how to do scalable brackets etc., insert Greek letters, etc.
etc. HOWEVER, as seems all too typical of OOo stuff, this help file might as
well be written in Old Georgian, as I find it very unclear how to proceed.
Has anyone used it?

I do want to do the main work in OO, since (1) I have it set up to insert
needed IPA/spec.chars. by keystrokes and (2) the file can so easily be
converted to a PDF. I am thinking one way around would be to compose the
_rules_ in WP, print, scan and create images (PNG?), which could then be
inserted in the OOo text (the rules themselves don't require the use of any
of WP's ugly IPA or Special Chars.). I strongly suspect this will be more
trouble than it's worth...

Plan X is to continue writing things all on one line (OK for feature
matrices e.g. [+XX +YY -ZZ], clear enough). Curly braces could if necessary
be done like this:

X --> Y / {1.abc, 2.def 3.mno} or this possibility--

        /{abc}
X --> Y /{def}
        /{mno}
(hope this transmits with the same spacing...)

Since my Gwr work with these formats is not likely to be reviewed by Chomsky
& Halle, I'm inclining toward the one-line approach; it's clear enough for
my (our??) purposes.

Any comments? Perhaps I ought to try IPA Zounds after all???, though I fear
the learning process will entail even more delay. Best to reply privately
maybe...
Roger

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