This is a huge problem for me, and I've not found a solution yet.
Has anyone found a practical way to use symbol font? It seems bizarre that for one font, I have to go to the glyph menu which starts with some preliminary menu, click on a folder to get the useful menu, which has a drop down list of all fonts, so I select symbol font, and then have to select "rho" from the list of characters. That's a lot of steps each time I want to use a Greek letter in an engineering text. Would be nice if the Scribus programmers would map the Greek letters against arabic characters so symbol font could work like all the other fonts. This would seem like a problem that comes up a lot and frankly is a mistake in the software.
Could there at least be some key-stroke short cuts to enter the letters from the symbol font?