I was preening my older notes and came across an article from 2002 deploring how redhat
8 had added unicode support, but that this made the system console {that is, the non-mouse,
non-X screen at the server} less colorful. I'm guessing they had to halve the number of
colors available from the video chip on mboard to get the bigger glyph table {as I call it}
for the non-ascii stuff of the stock unicode font.

Anyway, this article was once at www.frozenblue.net but that domain is 'parked' right now.
You'll have to see it on the circa 2003 snapshot at web.archive.org {if you forget that url
just google for the string wayback machine }
and click on the article in Mini-HOWTOs named
Bold/Bright and Normal Console Fonts for RedHat 8.0 HOWTO

I'm thinking all the steps he cites would also work on current redhat, btw... -- not that I need an extended size palette for when I'm plunked down by the server.

The only thing I use unicode aka utf-8 for is in the various man pages the dash and elipsis {"..."} and left-versus-right-sided quote marks.
And like he points out in the howto, you can just do export LANG=C
to make your man pages come out in stock english. As shipped you'll get LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in your bash sessions, hence the unicode man page output. This LANG adjustment works fine on telnet/ssh connections, too.

I've even gotten used to the text-mangling that unicode engenders on most historical versions of accuterm. And I see their accuterm-lite supports unicode.
...I'll still encounter older copies out in the field, so export LANG=C is my friend.

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