Following a user question on the French gentoo-user mailing-list about "why doesn't fbsplah display my accentued letters in silent text?", here is a small patch that adds one sentence to the "theme_format" documentation file to make clear that theme files should be UTF-8 encoded when using non-ASCII characters. Thanks, TGL.
Created attachment 63057 [details, diff] theme_format--note_about_utf8.patch
Fixed in 1.1.9.8. Thanks for the suggestion :)