I've got several questions about how to use both Cyrillic and
non-ASCII Latin letters the console.  Generally, you have two
possibilities -- to use Unicode, or to change between two encodings.

If you want to change between two 8-bit encodings (Cyrillic and
Latin), then you can use the script `cyr' to setup the Cyrillic
encoding.  You can also create the following script `lat' to setup the
Latin encoding:

#!/bin/sh

# Put here your preferences:
FONT=/usr/share/console-cyrillic/ter-114b.psf
ENCODING=iso15
KEYBOARD=de-latin1

case `tty` in
/dev/tty[0-9]*|/dev/vc/*)
    unicode_stop >/dev/null 2>&1
    if which consolechars >/dev/null 2>&1; then
        consolechars -f $FONT
        consolechars --sfm $ENCODING
        consolechars --acm $ENCODING
    else
        setfont $FONT
        setfont -m trivial
    fi
    loadkeys $KEYBOARD >/dev/null 2>&1
    /bin/echo -e -n "\\033(K" > `tty`
    ;;
esac

You are advised to use font with similar look for Latin and Cyrillic.
For instance you can use ter-c14b.psf (ter-slav-bold) for Cyrillic and
ter-i14b.psf for Latin.

If you want to use Unicode, then give to `cyr' the option `-e unicode'
and some font that contains both Cyrillic and non-ASCII letters.  For
instance you can use the font style `ter-uni-bold'.  If you want to
switch to Latin, then you don't need to change the font, but maybe you
will want to use different keyboard layout.  Note that the Cyrillic
keyboards can generate Latin letters if they are in Latin mode.
However they use the `qwerty' layout even if your keyboard is not a
`qwerty' one.


--
Anton Zinoviev <zinoviev@debian.org>
