debian man page for unicode_start

UNICODE_START(1)					      General Commands Manual						  UNICODE_START(1)

NAME
       unicode_start - put keyboard and console in unicode mode

SYNOPSIS
       unicode_start [font [umap]]

DESCRIPTION
       The unicode_start command will put the keyboard and console into Unicode (UTF-8) mode.

       For  the  keyboard  this  means that one can attach 16-bit U+xxxx values to keyboard keys using loadkeys(1), and have these appear as UTF-8
       input to user programs.	Also, that one can type hexadecimal Alt-xxxx using the numeric keypad, and again produce UTF-8.

       For the console this means that the kernel expects UTF-8 output from user programs, and displays the output accordingly.

       The parameter font is a font that is loaded. It should have a built-in Unicode map, or, if it hasn't, such a map can be given explicitly as
       second parameter.  When no font was specified, the current font is kept.

NOTE
       Unicode mode is a parameter with a value per virtual console.  However, usually the font and keymap is common to all consoles.

SEE ALSO
       dumpkeys(1), kbd_mode(1), loadkeys(1), unicode_stop(1), utf-8(7), setfont(8)

								    3 Feb 2001							  UNICODE_START(1)