On Fri, 23 Dec 2011, Robert Millan wrote:
The interesting thing is, that after activation of "swedish.iso", then Vim when used in a virtual console will accept Swedish vowels as blank, invisible characters.This suggest that input works but output doesn't. When doing this kind of tests it's better to split things, e.g. by putting the characters you want in a file and using "cat file" from the console.
I believe this is the "expected" situation as far as upstream is concerned. Syscons just doesn't have a good way to display unicode (but if I remember correctly it should be possible to use an 8-bit localized font and locale to get reasonable display.
I don't think this is particularly well documented, but searching through my mail archives picks up:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-June/017991.html and causes me to check the freebsd wiki and see: http://wiki.freebsd.org/SysconsUnicodeProjectEd Schouten (ed@freebsd.org) was the driving force behind the work to move to the xterm type from cons25 and accept unicode input, but I haven't seen any development on this stuff in many months. It's unclear whether he has plans to work on unicode display in the forseeable future, it might be worth asking him. I expect that if someone else wanted to tackle the project, he would be able to provide some guidance, though.
-Ben Kaduk