The problem is much worse than I thought. I used Scribus for years to publish a newsletter. Doing an engineering text with subscripts and symbols font has some real challenges:
If one changes the paragraph style, subscripts and "glyphs" are lost. Even if the only change in the style is tab settings. By "lost" I mean the subscript letters are there, but no longer subscripts. The glyphs convert to red boxes both in text editor and in the layout view. One would expect the subscripting and use of glyphs to occur BEFORE applying styles since those are the content and styles is formatting the layout of the content.
If one chooses to use copy/paste with a single glyph, or with any single character, if the glyph or character came from a paragraph with a different style -even if the only difference is tab setting, the paragraph you paste the one character into will change to the style of the paragraph the character came from. If you then revert the paragraph style back to what it was, the glyph you inserted will become a red box. If what you inserted was a few characters with a subscript -the subscript is lost. Example rC becomes rC. So if I try to bypass the tedious process of inserting a glyph (because symbol font doesn't work) I can't cut and paste a glyph into a paragraph with body text style into a paragraph with list style -even when they employ the same font, font size, and line spacing. Even if I did all the cut and paste before applying styles, once I then apply styles -the glyphs and subscripts will be gone.
If in texteditor you choose to insert a glyph, in page layout the glyph will appear as a redbox. So why even provide the option to insert a glyph in texteditor? If I replace the letter "r" in rC with the glyph for Greek letter "rho", I have a better than 50% chance the glyph will take on the subscript characteristic of the letter that follows it. I can't in layout mode change undo the automatically applied subscript. I can't undo it in texteditor either. That would result in a redbox replacing the glyph in layout view. the only reliable workaround is to replace the entire rC -which mean I can't just past in "rho" where it is followed by other subscripts.
Symbols font, chosen from dropdown menu within Scribus, does not work. So why is it even in the drop down list?
Please point out that I am using the software wrong, or mistaken in what I have experienced. I really hope I am wrong because this software prevents doing my work flow in the expected manner. I expect to create my content, text and illustrations, in some other software. Import the text into Scribus where I apply styles for headers, body text, lists, etc. as my last step in layout. Instead, I find I have to keep re-editing my text within Scribus in a remarkably tedious way because of the quirks mentioned above.
Even if I save my text in odt format, and "Get text" pulls it into texteditor with subscripts intact and even the same font as the odt file (I turn off the overrides during import). As soon as I apply a style, even if the only attribute of the style is to specify a tab setting -the subscripts are lost, effectively changing the content I imported. I also found that even in odt format, characters in symbols font are lost.
Scribus was nice for newsletter, posters and such things. It seems totally inept for technical publishing unless I learn LaTex or Tex just to have Greek letters and subscripts.
Again -please tell me I am wrong and there is a logical and efficient way to accomplish this in Scribus. This wasn't a problem with PageMaker over 20 years ago. So I'm not exactly asking for the impossible.