My thanks to Mike Fabian for the OK for asking the following question. I have what may be a slightly unusual set-up: SuSE 8.2 personal (with OOo installed as usual), and with Japanese enabled after that (thanks in great part to advice from Mike and others on this list and in private). So KDE (for example) is in Japanese, but OOo is in English. I'm able to type in Japanese in it, though. I've set up OOo for Asian fonts, as described on pp. 108+ of Haugland and Jones' book. Default languages are Western: English (USA) and Asian: Japanese. However, when I go to Language Settings | Asian Layout, I see that for First and Last characters the Language is Chinese (simplified). I can instead choose Japanese, click the box for default, and click the OK button -- and OOo stays that way until I close it down and reopen it, whereupon I'm back to Chinese (simplified). I don't mind if Japanese has its punctuation in the wrong places on the screen; I'd put up with going into this area of Options and specifying Japanese, clicking the box for default, and then the OK button, whenever I want to print. However, doing so seemingly has no effect -- I still have lines starting with periods, etc. Perhaps the default settings are wrong, and I should edit the lists of characters that mustn't appear at the beginning or end of a line. But that's rather difficult, as they're all displayed as boxes. It seems as if, in its menus, OOo is attempting to display Japanese (or simplified Chinese) in Arial or similar. If this were all, I suppose I'd put up with it. But it gets worse. If I have Japanese text and decide to plonk some roomaji in the middle of it, OOo appears then to regard the rest of the Japanese that follows it on the same line as a "word" -- which of course is too long to fit on the line. I'm not sure that this is the way OOo "thinks", but the usual result of putting some roomaji in a line is to add an unwanted line break after it. OOo is thus worse at layout than are plenty of humble text editors. This all seems very, very wrong. I imagine that I've made yet another moronic mistake. Please enlighten me!