I have now experimented with the contents of the Abiword .deb I referenced above and discovered that the only thing really needed from that package is /usr/bin/abiword itself.
So I have made a pet that overwrites the existing abiword with this slightly newer version and it seems to work really well in F95Mid, Medium-2b and Less.
Symbol insertion works well - although the symbol window almost feels "hung" as you first open it. Be patient and it does work.
The deb actually also had other plugins (eg word, opendocument etc) so some people may find it more useful to load the whole deb rather than my pet which is aiming to do just the minimum. As far as I can tell so far it makes .doc, .docx, .pdf and .abw fine. (Did not try ODT yet)
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I did note that some characters in the symbol window do not display correctly - just their ascii code appears - but not many.
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(The size of the Abiword ELF executable in the pet is smaller than the original one in F95 so it will even help shrink the iso size... Bonus!)