I found out that Debian has this wonderful program that will enable good UTF-8 support for VGA console. Unlike the traditional way (unicode_start), this does not limit the user to a 512 character font, and it does not prevent using bold (bright) colors unless necessary. VGA allows either - 256 character font with 16 colors, including bold, or - 512 character font, but without the bold color (is used as the highest bit instead) The fonts can be uploaded from software, as bitmaps. Where the traditional system uses fixed fonts, dynafont actually takes full advantage of the uploading and will upload those characters that are actually on-screen for the moment. Thus, it can support ANY 512 characters simultaneusly (they don't need to be in the same font). Additionally, when there are less than 256 different characters on screen, it switches to a 256 char mode, thus allowing the use of bold. (my description is based on the info that I gathered on the web, so it may be inaccurate) My only wonder is why this is not in Portage yet... ;) http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dynafont http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/debian-utf8/HOWTO/howto.html#AEN253
No progress here for 1 year, closing WONTFIX. Feel free to reopen with an ebuild.
