15.0 text mode oversight: console font doesn't match locale

In the move from 14.2 to 15.0, the default locale changed from en_US to en_US.UTF-8. Unfortunately, the default text-mode font doesn't quite match that locale. For example, 'man' renders some hyphens and quotation marks as nonsense characters.

I think I will solve this for myself by setting LANG back to en_US, as I don't need Unicode on the console, but I would welcome others' solutions or comments.

(Hopefully, this thread will be of use to someone who notices the same issue in the future.)

My solution was to specify ter-v16b in /etc/rc.d/rc.font and make the file executable.

Ah, from /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/README.terminus, I see that ter-v16b is a bold 8x16 Terminus font that combines many character sets.

I also see that the default console font is one called "default" (though there are two of those...).

There's a setfont command, but I don't see a getfont command, or other way of knowing which font is currently loaded. (The showconsolefont command outputs the font itself, but not its name.) Does anyone know how to get this info?

Why ship in 2023 console fonts without an UTF-8 mapping is beyond me. But Slackware is not alone, even Arch does that...

Edit: Sorry, I didn't read your post so well.

Didier, a console font can only have 512 glyphs. You can't get a lot of Unicode coverage with that. (c.f. https://slackware.uk/~urchlay/repos/...e-fonts/about/)

In Unicode version 15.0 from 13 September 2022 149,186 characters are listed, so indeed we need more than one console font to provide glyphs for all of them.